Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 February 11

= February 11 =

Long-fingering
stop sniggering at the back In this BBC article, a Sinn Fein MLA is quoted as saying "I'm sorry, long-fingering this does a disservice to women", in connexion with a DUP attempt to delay legislation by appointing a commission to look into the matter at hand. Is long-fingering a common Northern Irish expression? I've never heard it before, or at least not in this context. I said, stop sniggering! DuncanHill (talk) 06:24, 11 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Seems to mean "delaying decisions and legislation for as long as possible in order to minimise the likelihood of popular dissent". And common enough (in regular Ireland) to not explain that till the third paragraph. InedibleHulk (talk) 06:34, 11 February 2016 (UTC)


 * It's a thing in regular Britain, too. InedibleHulk (talk) 06:42, 11 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Just found that although it's not in OED, it is in Oxford Dictionaries website, which does say it's Irish. I don't think I've ever heard it before. I wonder who the PM's spokesman quoted in the Iraq story you linked was. DuncanHill (talk) 07:13, 11 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Not sure. British media seem to have a thing about just calling them spokeseman. The very English-sounding Alastair Campbell was the big cheese at the time (or shortly before). The very Irish-sounding Ciarán Ward only started in 2009. Whatever any underlings are saying, I imagine it can't be too far off from the Director, if not directly written by him. Not sure if the Media Manager is more like the Downing Street Press Secretary, Downing Street Director of Communications or the Prime Minister's Spokesman (currently a very female-sounding bloke). InedibleHulk (talk) 08:58, 11 February 2016 (UTC)


 * On February 6, 2003, the Prime Minister's Official Spokesman was named...Prime Minister's Official Spokesman. That afternoon, same deal. InedibleHulk (talk) 09:19, 11 February 2016 (UTC)


 * On September 24, 2003, the Prime Minister's Official Spokesman was two people. Godric Smith was later a Head and three kinds of Director. Tom Kelly called David Kelly Walter Mitty. InedibleHulk (talk) 09:33, 11 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Good work! Well, Tom Kelly is from Northern Ireland, so I think we can put the long-finger down to him. DuncanHill (talk) 09:38, 11 February 2016 (UTC)


 * I'd like to give him a good, hard finger-wagging, too. InedibleHulk (talk) 09:55, 11 February 2016 (UTC)


 * "Put something on the long finger" is an Irish English idiom, a calque of the equivalent idiom in the Irish language. A verb "to long-finger something" is not something I've seen before, but zero derivation is a  productive process in English. The same thing happens with a near synonym of "long finger": "back burner" in dictionaries is only a noun, as in to "put X on the back burner"; but Googling  shows plenty of natural-looking examples as a verb. jnestorius(talk) 20:47, 13 February 2016 (UTC)


 * So far, "back-burnerer" and "long-fingerer" are only typos, according to Google. But we need to call people who do these things something, so consider them coined, as of now. InedibleHulk (talk) 21:10, 13 February 2016 (UTC)
 * How about politician? clpo13(talk) 23:08, 13 February 2016 (UTC)
 * "Study it to death" might also work for this in the US, where, to avoid the public complaining that they aren't doing anything about a problem, the politicians will form endless committees to study and write reports, in the hope that the public will lose interest, then then can quietly drop the issue without actually solving it. StuRat (talk) 21:18, 13 February 2016 (UTC)

the thingness of things
How long has a thing been a thing? —Tamfang (talk) 09:42, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Thing Magazine would be the place to look. It was briefly the authority on what is and isn't. Sadly, it itself is no longer a thing. InedibleHulk (talk) 09:58, 11 February 2016 (UTC)


 * It was already a thing in 2007, when Lisa confirms to Bart that singing opera better on your back is a thing, but painting better on your back isn't. Homer does it regardless. InedibleHulk (talk) 10:07, 11 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Too haecceitistic for me, I'm afraid. — SMUconlaw (talk) 10:08, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
 * I was wrong, anyway. Just rewatched, and it's singing opera that doesn't make you a better painter. And both times, Bart asked "Is that a real thing?" InedibleHulk (talk) 10:30, 11 February 2016 (UTC)


 * The earliest this guy found was a 2001 episode of That '70s Show. Not sure if that means it was around in the '70s. InedibleHulk (talk) 10:53, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Oddly enough, That '70s Show never aired in the 70s. So it's probably not a reliable document for English As She Is Spoke by 70s people.  -- Jayron 32 13:42, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Not entirely reliable. Maybe not even half. They once went to "WWF" show in 1977, which made me spit my Rondo all over my Nipkow disk (in my defense, this was eight months before "A Wizard Did It" was a thing). But it wasn't all anachronisms and misremembrances. They did well with the set design and wardrobes, maybe the writers were honest, too. I'd put the likelihood for this one existing at a solid 20%. InedibleHulk (talk) 08:24, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
 * 2001 is compatible with my own earliest example (forgotten until I looked for something else), in a Buffy episode in 2002. ("A muscle cramp, in your pants?" "What? It's a thing.") —Tamfang (talk) 10:15, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
 * A somewhat different sense of "It's a thing" occurs twice in the next season: it seems to mean "It's something he does for his own reasons, too wearisome for me to try to explain." —Tamfang (talk) 06:15, 14 February 2016 (UTC)


 * If Google's to be trusted, the question "when did a thing become a thing?" became a thing in 2013, but 2015 was its big year. This is the earliest I see. The same day, someone asked about self-parody. But the answer, like Dave, wasn't quite there yet. InedibleHulk (talk) 08:33, 12 February 2016 (UTC)


 * It's either advancing years or being on the other side of the Atlantic, but I don't understand any of this. Alansplodge (talk) 09:58, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
 * I think Tamfang is asking when the term a thing came into currency, i.e., "became a thing". — SMUconlaw (talk) 10:27, 12 February 2016 (UTC)


 * I deeply empathize. Near as I can tell, it's kind of like what we would call "a big deal" (or not, as the case may be). ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 10:32, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Urban dictionary indicates that's pretty much right. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 10:37, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure that captures the proper sense of "a thing." The sense when you say "Is this a thing?' now" means "are people really doing this?"  Not that it's a "big deal", but just that people are doing some fad.  -- Jayron 32'' 15:36, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Ah, I think I see now. Thanks. Perhaps it evolved from "the next big thing"?  Alansplodge (talk) 15:55, 12 February 2016 (UTC)


 * A bit of digging and it seems that grammarphobia.com agrees my suggestion above in The Grammarphobia Blog - The thing about thing. On the specific original question...
 * ''"Finally we come to the use of “thing” by itself to mean a fad or a trend. The earliest example we've found is from an article in the November 1984 issue of Musician magazine. In the article, Garry Tallent, the bassist for the E Street Band, comments on a People magazine piece that compared the “clean-living” band to the Hardy Boys.
 * 'It’s true,' Tallent is quoted as saying, 'but, especially since People magazine, it’s become a thing.'"
 * Alansplodge (talk) 16:13, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
 * I think "big deal" and "current trend or fad" are sufficiently similar. Perhaps "big deal at the moment" would be more to the point. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:26, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
 * Good find Alan. Perhaps related: "Ain't no thing but a chicken wing" is attested in print from 1988. Of course that's not the same of being a thing, it means roughly "no big deal", but I think there's a potential connection, as being "a thing" is a natural opposite to something being ain't no thing.
 * Outkast had "Ain't no thang" in 1994, but "thang" is definitely much older. I don't really speak that variety of English fluently, but usage of "thang" in southern USA dates to 1937 , and I think it can equate in some uses to something being a thing in the way that OP means. As with almost all American language trends, I also suspect very old roots in Jazz dialects. In this case Cab Calloway is the closest I can get , though I don't see anything specifically about thing or thang in the Hepster's dictionary . Then of course there's "the real thing", which also may be related... SemanticMantis (talk) 17:22, 12 February 2016 (UTC)

Assignment of Gender
In languages that have grammatical gender, how are new words or coinages assigned gender? Are there rules for gender assignment? And if so, do they vary from language to language? La  Al qu im  is ta  13:09, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
 * I'm sure there is considerable variation from language to language, but Grammatical gender covers some general trends and principles. -- Jayron 32 13:38, 11 February 2016 (UTC)
 * And also the section Grammatical gender. Loraof (talk) 14:57, 11 February 2016 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure, but I think the Académie_française tries to explicitly prescribe "correct" and official usage for these cases in French.List_of_language_regulators may also have some interesting leads. SemanticMantis (talk) 17:04, 12 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Regarding the question: "do they [the rules for gender assignment] vary from language to language?", I'm pretty certain WP:OR the answer is yes, and that there are no hard and fast rules to begin with, but that the gender of new words is assigned by consensus within the community of people who are likely to use the new words. My WP:OR example is the word "podcast" in Norwegian. I was an early adpter of podcast listening, and instictively assigned the noun as neuter -- "Et podkast" -- possibly because of etymology "cast (noun)" = "throw (noun)" = "kast (noun, neuter, Norwegian)". However, "podkast" today has masculine gender in Norwegian. Possibly because new Romance loanwords tend to be assigned masculine gender. No "rule" (AFAIK), but common practice. --NorwegianBluetalk 23:56, 12 February 2016 (UTC)
 * For an example of this, see es:Casete, the Spanish article on the cassette tape. It consistently uses "el casete" (masculine), but this YouTube video uses "la casete", and the Spanish article on Digital Audio Tape, entitled es:Cinta de audio digital, uses both "el casete" and "la casete".  Apparently you're right either way in Spanish.  Nyttend (talk) 06:08, 13 February 2016 (UTC)
 * In Polish, some loanwords have changed gender over time. Kometa ("comet"), for example, was masculine in the 19th century, but is now feminine, like most other nouns ending in -eta. Album used to be neuter, like all other Polish words of Latin origin ending in -um, but is masculine today. — Kpalion(talk) 10:00, 15 February 2016 (UTC)