Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 November 13

= November 13 =

A question about the Spanish language and United States law
For editors who are bilingual in Spanish and English or otherwise have very good Spanish, please see Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Law which is a discussion on whether an incident in which an American girl who had killed someone (and was convicted of aggravated assault but not of homicide) should be described as a "homicide". It involves an article on the Spanish Wikipedia but I am posting the question on EN to get feedback in relation to the United States legal system. WhisperToMe (talk) 04:47, 13 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Any killing of one human by another can be called "homicide". The legal culpability for a homicide will vary from state to state. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 05:24, 13 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I have answered the question at the target discussion. μηδείς (talk) 05:35, 13 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Per Bugs, there are very few Federal laws dealing with homicide. Crime and punishment have historically been held to be state's matters, so each state has its own codes for dealing with these issues.  There is no "In the U.S...." way to answer the question.  All questions regarding laws in the U.S. should generally be phrased as "In the U.S. state of..."  One would think that Federalism in the United States would cover this relationship, but it's sadly lacking in general principles, and really provides more of a historical perspective.-- Jayron 32 14:50, 13 November 2015 (UTC)
 * In any event, "homicide" is a general descriptive, but not usually a criminal charge. The words used for the crime of taking another life are usually manslaughter or murder. StevenJ81 (talk) 16:57, 13 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Agree. In many jurisdictions, coroners often rule deaths as "homicide", meaning merely that the death was due to the intentional act of another person, regardless of that person's legal culpability for murder, manslaughter, or any other crime.  Nyttend (talk) 18:34, 13 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, but this is in English. There is no crime called "homicide" in any Anglo-American jurisdiction I'm aware of (though there is criminally negligent homicide in some jurisdictions).  In Spanish-speaking countries, I think, there is often a specific crime called homicidio, and it may be problematic to distinguish the crime from the purely descriptive fact of the death of a person caused by another person (even when there is no criminal liability). --Trovatore (talk) 18:40, 13 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Oh, Nyttend, I don't think "homicide" in English has to be the result of an intentional act. If you kill someone by pure misadventure, I think that is still homicide. --Trovatore (talk) 18:45, 13 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Wouldn't that be death by misadventure, or even death by accident? Nyttend (talk) 18:48, 13 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Well, here we might need to distinguish between the term used as technical language by coroners, and the meaning of the English word. I think in English, if you kill someone, that's homicide.  Even if it was purely by accident, and you were in no way negligent. --Trovatore (talk) 18:54, 13 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Since people have broadened this to other English-speaking countries, I'll note that section 222 of the Criminal Code of Canada explicitly defines: "A person commits homicide when, directly or indirectly, by any means, he causes the death of a human being." This is even broader than Bugs and Trovatore have been saying, because it includes suicide. --70.49.170.168 (talk) 19:19, 13 November 2015 (UTC)


 * I'll point out that homicide is a coroner's ruling for the cause of death under common law systems, and is not in itself a criminal charge. But the OP really isn't asking for the niceties and variations of usage in English dialects and jurisdictions.  Rather, WhisperToMe has asked how the term killer should be translated from the English into Spanish for use in the Spanish article.  The various words in English and Spanish do not overlap perfectly. The answer there is that killer in the neutral stipulated sense of this case would be translated as la homicida, not la matadora. μηδείς (talk) 23:57, 13 November 2015 (UTC)
 * , is this because she is not killing bulls. See matador. KägeTorä - (影虎)  ( もしもし！ ) 08:15, 18 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Check out the origin of matador. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 12:52, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

Hapax legomena among proper nouns
Is it reasonable to use the term "hapax legomenon" when we're dealing solely with a collection of names? I've just expanded the intro of List of townships in Ohio, including adding "...there are 618 different names used by townships statewide, including 451 names used only once. On the opposite end of the spectrum, forty-three townships are named "Washington", and eight other names are used for twenty or more townships each". Distribution generally appears to follow the concepts mentioned in the hapax article's lead, although it fails to follow Zipf's law because the five most common names are used 43, 35, 27, 25, and 25 times each. In particular, because names were assigned at the whims of the namers, rather than being used with specific meanings (in most cases, there was no reason that "Washington Township" couldn't instead have been named "Adams Township", for example) as with normal vocabulary terms, I'm left wondering whether the hapax concept is really applicable to a collection of names. Nyttend (talk) 18:40, 13 November 2015 (UTC)
 * The criterion for being a "hapax legomenon" is normally taken to be how often a word has actually been recorded (in the written record preserved), not how many things it has been used for, so I'd say it doesn't really quite fit here (evidently, each name, even if used for only one place, will have been uttered and written by multiple people on multiple occasions, in multiple known texts.) Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:49, 13 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I understand your answer until the long parenthetical phrase; I can't understand how that fits with the concept of a single text's hapax legomena. For example, "matrimonial" isn't anywhere close to being a hapax legomenon, but it is a hapax legomenon in Moby-Dick.  I'm trying to discover whether it's reasonable to say that the uniquely named townships are hapax legomena within the collection of Ohio townships.  Nyttend (talk) 18:54, 13 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Ah, I see what you mean now – if you take the term as restricted to the context of studying a single text "corpus", and if you take that Ohio collection as such a corpus, then I guess you could get away with it. Fut.Perf. ☼ 19:22, 13 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I'm no academic expert here, but I'd guess the concept doesn't apply here, for the following two reasons (at least):
 * 618 isn't really a statistically meaningful base for this type of analysis
 * the "whims" you describe above were clearly not entirely random. There was no reason that "Washington Township" couldn't have been "Adams Township", perhaps, but there was every reason that "Washington Township" wasn't "Adams Township".
 * So while I can't say that you can't apply the term to this case, I think it's highly misleading to do so. StevenJ81 (talk) 19:26, 13 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I'll agree,, with the negative opinions above. The term hapax legomenon is only used for words that appear only once in the Bible or other classical texts.  Given any list of Ohio townships will be widely disseminated and the uniquely named townships will be named in innumerable documents, the concept as normally conceived simply does not apply. BTW, there are six Washington Townships in NJ, and even Governor Christie has been unable to rectify this. μηδείς (talk) 05:11, 16 November 2015 (UTC)
 * The point of 618 or 451 among 1310 (or whatever the total number is) makes sense; thank you. However, it would be appreciated if you didn't waste everyone's time with outright wrong answers.  (1) In many cases, several townships were formed at the same time, and many or all would be named for famous individuals, without any reason for assigning a name to one spot on the map instead of another.  (2) Moby-Dick is not a classical text by any stretch of the imagination.  Nyttend (talk) 05:17, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

Shit happenstance
While I realize that this page is no substitute for AfD, its denizens (you) do seem interested in, and often informed about, quirks of language use. And so: If "shit happens" is encyclopedic, I invite the addition of evidence for this in the article (!) "Shit happens". -- Hoary (talk) 22:37, 13 November 2015 (UTC)
 * I haven't put that much effort into it, but I think I've significantly improved it ... and yet the result still seems utterly unnoteworthy. Over to somebody(es) among youse. -- Hoary (talk) 04:29, 14 November 2015 (UTC)
 * If the nonsense called the "santorum" is noteworthy, then this much-more-broadly-used expression certainly is. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 05:32, 14 November 2015 (UTC)
 * You're using 'noteworthy' in the everyday sense, not the Wikipedia sense. One of the two terms has had extensive third-party coverage and commentary, the other has not and should probably be deleted. 99.235.223.170 (talk) 14:03, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
 * That "santorum" thing is only known in certain political circles, and it has no encyclopedic value. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:09, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
 * You linked to the article, so I assume you're capable of finding the references section: Slate, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, CNN, ABC News, etc, etc. are all in there. That's not indicative of something "...only known in certain political circles..." I've already linked the notability guidelines for you, but perhaps WP:DONTLIKEIT would be more germane? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.235.223.170 (talk) 18:59, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
 * It's not inherently a vulgarism, so they could talk about it without saying too much. The G-rated version of this one is "stuff happens", and here's a random example from the NYT. I am confident that you will find such references far more widespread than the cultish term "santorum". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:26, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Here's an article from 12 years ago talking about various attempts to curb the bumper stickers which have been around since at least the early 1990s. In contrast, you could have a "Santorum" bumper sticker and most observers would assume that's your favorite Republican presidential candidate. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:33, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
 * It does seem to me that the "G-rated version" has more signs of significance, what with "Rumsfeld on looting in Iraq: 'Stuff happens'" (which gave rise to Stuff Happens), "Jeb Bush says 'stuff happens' in response to gun violence", and perhaps more besides. (Incidentally, "santorum happens" is a thing -- though an extremely minor one.) The mention of "shit happens" in the firstamendmentcenter.org page is promising, but I'm a legal ignoramus and therefore very reluctant to attempt a paraphrase of any legal discussion. Somebody better equipped than I am and interested in adding it should also see this. -- Hoary (talk) 22:47, 15 November 2015 (UTC)