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May 31

"Good" ship

Where does the habit/style/preference of calling a ship "good" come from? Lightfoot uses the construction a few different ways in The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald and of course there's the plane of On the Good Ship Lollipop. More infamously, there's the much earlier Good Ship Venus. How did the "good" appellation become standard? Matt Deres (talk) 14:44, 31 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I've only found an even earlier song: I sailed in the good ship the Kitty (c1777-1778), by Charles Dibdin. There's some uncited speculation on a language board that it originally meant a "goods ship" as opposed to a warship. Alansplodge (talk) 17:01, 31 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Aha! A bit more digging reveals that the traditional formula for a bill of lading (a certificate from a shipper that goods had been received and loaded onto a particular vessel) was from the 18th century:

"Shipped by the Grace of God in good Order, and well conditioned by... in and upon the good ship called the..."

(From THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE BILL OF LADING: ITS FUTURE IN THE MARITIME INDUSTRY (p. 52))

The "good ship" element was a confirmation that the ship was in a seaworthy condition. Apparently, the need to make this declaration was removed in the UK by the Carriage of Goods by Sea Act 1924. [1]

Alansplodge (talk) 17:22, 31 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Persuant to the above, I found this text of a bill of lading of 1636:

Shipped by the grace of God in good order and well-conditioned by Mee, Thomas Goold merchant in and vpon the good Ship called the Mayflower of London. Whereof is Master under God for this present voyage Willyam Badiley and now riding at ankor in the Riuer of Lisboa and by Gods grace bound for London to say tene Chests of sugarrs namely Muscouado & 2 whites for the account present of the worshipfull Thomas Crossing of Exon merchant being marked and numbred as in the margent and are to be deliuerd in the like good order and wel conditioned at the ofersaid Port of London (the danger of the Seas only excepted) vnto Master Richard Poerry, or in his Absense Hugh Sander or to their assignes, he or they payning fraight for the said goods, After 16/8 per chest with primage and Avarage accustomed. An witness wherof the Master or Purser of the said ship hath affirmed to three Bills of Lading all of this tenont and date, the one of which three Bills being accomplished, the other two to stand void. And so God send the good Ship to her desired Port in safety. Amen. [2]

Alansplodge (talk) 17:42, 31 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting. Whether it's directly derived from "goods ship" or not, it seems like "goods", "good order", and "good ship" share a long history. Before posting, I wondered if perhaps it came from the ratings ships were given for insurance purposes. Example. If given the choice, people would want their goods carried on a "good" ship. Matt Deres (talk) 19:08, 31 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

OED has it "In extended use of a ship, town, river, etc. (chiefly with reference to things personified or conventionally treated as feminine" under good: "Of a person: distinguished by admirable or commendable qualities; worthy, estimable, fine" in a 1400 MS of the Cursor Mundi, "Euer-mare þai lokid doun. quen þat gode ship sulde droun", and 1589 in Hakluytt "Being imbarked in the good shippe, called the Gallion of London". DuncanHill (talk) 18:59, 31 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

So having a good ship is like finding a good woman? Or man, for that matter, though I hear those are hard to find. Matt Deres (talk) 19:10, 31 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Or good hearts. DuncanHill (talk) 19:54, 31 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

For some reason specifically for doctors, the good doctor, but rarely the good nurse.^[3] ‑‑Lambiam 05:53, 1 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm reminded of goodwife and goodman, and good-king-henry. It's a medieval honorific, seems calling everything respected "good" was once a common habit. Card Zero (talk) 10:25, 1 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

And Good Queen Bess. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:37, 1 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Good King Wenceslas, in versions old enough not to reverse the wording, says, "Mark my footsteps, good my page...". ("...my good page..." would imply the existence, or at least the possibility, of a bad page, which is nowhere suggested in the story.) 213.143.143.69 (talk) 13:03, 2 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"My good lady wife" is a cousin of "goodwife". It's confined to a particular register. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:22, 2 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

June 2

UK Parliament capitalisation rules

When we are referring to the UK parliament (or any other legislative body which functions in a similar way) as a common noun and not a proper noun, should it still be capitalised on Wikipedia pages? notadev (talk) 19:15, 2 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It might say somewhere in WP:MOS. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 00:53, 3 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The relevant specific section of the MOS is MOS:INSTITUTIONS. It appears that "Parliament" is usually capitalized here in a UK context when it refers to the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, just as "Senate" is capitalized in a U.S. context when it refers to the United States Senate. Similar bodies in other countries are usually referred to by their specific proper names, but common noun usages ought not be capitalized. Note that MOS:INSTITUTIONS says, "If you are not sure whether the English translation of a foreign name is exact or not, assume it is rough and use lower case (e.g., the French parliament)." Deor (talk) 01:56, 3 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

June 3

How to find the most likely or common English text strings of a pattern?

i.e. " the " likely tops the list for string pattern " abc " case-sensitive, " ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQ " case-insensitive is probably " subdermatoglyphic ", one of the more common "Abcdc! Abef ef abga abehi gigeh! Ga abc aghj E abehj ea hcckl bc" patterns case-sensitive is "There! This is that thing again! At the tank I think it needs he" and so on. There's likely a webpage or app that shows if a pattern matches a text corpus and how many times it's each string? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 00:52, 3 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There are many such websites readily found through a simple Google search. Most can be searched for patterns like this using regular expressions or similar. Searching across several of the corpora available here, "the" is indeed the most common three-letter string; the most common 17-letter string varies quite a bit across the different corpora but "interdisciplinary" seems to be ranked the highest on average in web and news sources while "misunderstandings" and "institutionalized" dominate in film and television scripts (not counting hyphenated words, as I assume you aren't). I was unable, however, to find a freely available online tool that would accept regex strings longer than five words (per your third query), nor one which allowed their sources to be downloaded and searched independently by the end user. (fugues) (talk) 03:57, 3 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Interdisciplinary would be ABCDEFAGHAIJABKEL not ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQ, the 1st letter appears 4 times the r appears twice and the n appears twice. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 04:29, 3 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, I see — for some reason I assumed you were just using the letters of the alphabet as wildcards, not distinct characters... I'm sure there's a way to do this in regex too, but the pseudo-regex system available on the website I linked to previously isn't robust enough to deal with this sort of search. If a large enough corpus were available freely for download somewhere, this wouldn't be a particularly difficult computer science exercise, so if you make some progress in that area feel free to reach out. You may also find it valuable to ask this question over on the computing board. (fugues) (talk) 15:41, 3 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It is generally easy in an extended regex to require equality of strings, but requiring inequality is not as common. Attempting to match abcdc may find, next to where and there, also halal, error, rarer and tests. ‑‑Lambiam 16:51, 3 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Cornwall

In Language and History in Early Britain, Kenneth H. Jackson reconstructs the Brittonic etymon of Kernow and Cernyw (the Cornish and Welsh names for Cornwall) as *Cornou̯i̯ā. In Studies in British Celtic Historical Phonology on the other hand, Peter Schrijver gives *Kornou̯(i̯)ī as the etymon. This raises a couple of questions. Firstly, which reconstruction is more correct? Secondly, I gather that the first element means "horn", but what do the different suffixes mean? Zacwill (talk) 15:51, 3 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wiktionary gives, without source, the etymon Proto-Brythonic *Körnɨw. For the latter, the etymology section has:

"Consistent with derivation from Proto-Celtic *Kornowī with final and internal i-affection, i.e. *Kornowī > *Kornɨwī > *Körnɨw. This would imply an earlier place name *Kornowī (“people of the horn”), which can possibly be inferred from the Ravenna Cosmography; see Cornovii, Cornovii (Cornwall), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ḱerh₂- (“horn”).

A fossilized genitive of this form may be found in Middle Welsh Corneu < *Kornowyās."

‑‑Lambiam 17:03, 3 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The entry actually cites the books I mentioned, which only adds to the confusion, since neither Jackson nor Schrijver give the forms *Körnɨw, *Kornowī, *Kornowyās. Zacwill (talk) 17:23, 3 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Here's what EO says about it:[4] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:37, 3 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Is *C ever used in reconstructions for the [k] sound? It appears ambiguous... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 12:35, 4 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe because there's no letter "k" in the Welsh alphabet. Alansplodge (talk) 11:12, 5 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There's no 'k' in the modern Welsh alphabet, but that convention only goes back to early printing - apparently English printers didn't enough 'k' sorts. (see Welsh orthography#History). ColinFine (talk) 18:40, 12 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

June 5

Question from اُسید محمود on Urdu alphabet (17:46, 4 June 2025)

Moved from User talk:Aaron Liu § Question from اُسید محمود on Urdu alphabet (17:46, 4 June 2025)

– Aaron Liu (talk) 12:00, 5 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

How do I romanize the Urdu letters ں and آ --اُسید محمود (talk) 17:46, 4 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There are different systems in use for the romanization of Urdu.

Our article on the Uddin and Begum Hindustani romanisation system does, unfortunately, not show the letters of the Urdu alphabet that are being romanized, but I think ں is romanized as (n), a letter n enclosed between a pair of parentheses. The آ is romanized as a', a letter a followed by an apostrophe.

In the ALA-LC romanization, ں is romanized as n, a letter n with an underscore, while آ is romanized as ā at the beginning of a word and as 'ā at the beginning of a syllable within a word.^[5]

There is also an informal way of romanizing Urdu using only the 26 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It has no written rules. I suppose some speakers will simply omit ں while others may represent it with an n. The representation of آ is almost certainly a simple letter a. ‑‑Lambiam 15:28, 5 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

June 6

Increasing use of foreign diacritics for non-English names

I'm starting to see a trend of foreign diacritics being increasingly used for non-Anglophone names, starting with ice hockey (NHL-centric), Wikipedia or even the local-ish news (CBC). Is it supposed to be particularly astute or respectful? Writing "Ngô Đình Diệm" each time (having to use Google and copy/paste), seems quite the hassle. Matt714931 (talk) 20:29, 6 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It's more correct, at least. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 21:25, 6 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Someone's name may become a vulgar term when projected on the 26 letters of the English alphabet. ‑‑Lambiam 22:29, 6 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

My given name is Swedish Håkan, without diacritics it would be Hakan, "the chin", which arguably sounds more quaint than vulgar. It's also quite similar to the popular Turkish name Hakan. Swedish Håkan means roughly Prince, while Turkish Hakan means roughly King, but the similarity in appearance and meaning is apparently just a coincidence. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 12:56, 13 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It's the flip side of the increased technology we have these days. In living memory, all we had access to on typewriters was the basic 26-letter alphabet in upper and lower case, hence diacritics were simply ignored. But now we have all this newfangled stuff, and this gives us choices: continue to ignore diacritics, or use only the commonest ones, or become the Compleat Diacritician.

The more interesting issue, for me, is just what language is it we're writing in? Just because we can now access all the diacritics that are used in Vietnamese or whatever else, and all manner of non-Latin alphabets as well, does that mean we should use them in an otherwise English-language text? Why not write Putin using Cyrillic letters (Путин), or Mitsotakis using Greek letters (Μητσοτάκης), etc? They would be no more foreign to most anglophone eyes than Ngô Đình Diệm is. A version of the Latin alphabet that differs in any way from the one we use (and that includes French, German, Italian, Spanish, all the Scandinavian and Balkan languages, Icelandic, Romanian, Polish, Czech ...) is just as foreign as Arabic or Urdu, Greek or Cyrillic. Where should the line be drawn? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 23:27, 6 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It is not that long ago that "æsthetic" and "archæology" were completely normal spellings.^[6][7] It is also not that long ago that authors generally wrote their books with pens on paper; typewriters were not common household items but found in offices. French proper names would be written and printed with accents: "Géricault","Guérin", "Eugène".^[8] Technology giveth and Technology taketh away; Technology be praised. ‑‑Lambiam 05:58, 7 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It's also not that long ago that Greek words in Latin, French, or English texts (eg philosophy texts) would as a matter of course be printed in Greek letters. ColinFine (talk) 18:43, 12 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Even in poetry. ---Sluzzelin talk 19:39, 12 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Latin letters with diacritics are not as alien as Arabic. To an English speaker, the diacriticised České Budějovice (a.k.a. Budweis, of the beer) shouldn't be much harder than the diacritic-free Nieuwerkerk aan den IJssel. If you try to pronounce them, you'll get half the sounds right and the other half reasonably close, good enough to buy a train ticket to those places. With names in Arabic script, you won't even be able to guess. Typing the diacritics is easy most of the time (hint: <compose> v C, <compose> ' e, <compose> v e) and it helps the people who do know something about foreign pronunciation rules. Only few are absolute monoglots; even most English speakers have some knowledge of French or Spanish pronunciation rules. PiusImpavidus (talk) 11:31, 7 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

June 7

"Is" vs. "Was"

I've been having a discussion (more of an argument, really) with Gemini regarding "is" vs. "was" in (for example) the Guruvayur Keshavan article which begins:

Gajarajan Guruvayur Keshavan (c.1912—2 December 1976) is perhaps the most famous and celebrated temple elephant in Kerala, India. He was donated to the Guruvayur temple by the royal family of Nilambur on 4 January 1922.

I contend that he still is "perhaps the most famous..." Gemini disagrees, stating that ... he was a famous elephant (while he was alive and in his historical context), and his fame persists, but he himself is no longer alive. (The discussion continues at length)

Which is correct? 136.56.165.118 (talk) 22:32, 7 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The issue is squarely that being famous or celebrated is not a very concrete thing to be (there are not celebrations taking place that we're counting!). This is part of why both is ... famous and was ... famous should be avoided at all costs in encyclopedic writing. Remsense 🌈 论 22:37, 7 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That's arguably an issue as well, but it is not about tense per se, which I have addressed below. --Trovatore (talk) 22:40, 7 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Not directly no, but I think the fronting of fame is what obscures the actual issue, maybe? Remsense 🌈 论 22:41, 7 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It's a recurrent problem in biographies of deceased persons about whom you want to say something that remains true. Shakespeare's bio absolutely must begin in the past tense, but when discussing his importance to modern literary studies, you'd use the present tense. It can get a little awkward; careful phrasing can often get around the issue. --Trovatore (talk) 22:49, 7 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

For the first sentence of an article about a deceased person or animal, you should definitely use "was". I think the problem here is that you're trying to talk about his life (which is past tense) and his fame (which is present tense) in the same clause. You could separate them out by making the first sentence about his life, and put his fame in a later sentence, phrase or clause. Something like Gajarajan Guruvayur Keshavan was a temple elephant in Kerala, India. He is possibly the most famous and celebrated of all Kerala's temple elephants. More elegantly, these could be condensed into a single sentence along the lines of Gajarajan Guruvayur Keshavan was a temple elephant in Kerala, India, perhaps the most famous and celebrated of all Kerala's temple elephants. --Trovatore (talk) 22:39, 7 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Done Thanks! --136.56.165.118 (talk) 23:18, 7 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'd just note that there are lots of other classes of recurring problems in this area. Extinct taxa; old TV shows; deceased mythological figures. I personally would use "was" for all of these. I think it's very weird that the first sentence of The Steve Allen Show is in the present tense. It makes sense for serials that have a unified story arc, say Babylon 5 or Breaking Bad, but for these episodic things that were never even really meant to be shown more than once, it strikes me as just an entrenched position that some editors have adopted and will not be budged from. --Trovatore (talk) 23:35, 7 June 2025 (UTC) [reply]

I think software is the area where people become totally split and tend to prefer the present tense. Remsense 🌈 论 23:36, 7 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm totally fine with software in the present tense, at least as long as copies exist and there's still hardware that could run it. I think that's different from episodic TV shows. At least in original intent, they were more like recurring events than persistent works of literature.

As for mythological figures, I think if the myth says he's dead, we should use past tense. Odin is, but ~~Cronus~~ Hector was. This is different from fictional figures, which should be in the present tense even if they die in the fictional work. The difference is that fiction does not assert itself to be reality, whereas myth does.

Extinct taxa are awkward because you usually want to say something about them that's true in the present (such as their relationship to living taxa), but that strikes me as parallel to the issue that started this question. --Trovatore (talk) 23:48, 7 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Odin dies at Ragnarök, although that is arguably in a future point of time. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 00:57, 8 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, taking the myth at face value, I think you have to put Ragnarök in the future, but if that's thought to be ambiguous, substitute Zeus. --Trovatore (talk) 01:05, 8 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

...although that does bring up another point. Odin still has worshipers; I'm not aware that Zeus does (my guess would be that he does and I just don't know about them, but still I'm not aware that he does). It's possible my intuitions could be affected by whether the myth itself has any modern currency. --Trovatore (talk) 01:30, 8 June 2025 (UTC) [reply]

According to Hellenism (modern religion), practice of the classical Greek religion died out mostly by the 9th and completely by the 13th century CE, but was revived in the 18th, and there are current practitioners. It would be difficult to determine how many of them view it as performative recreation, how many find value in the religion taken as metaphorical, and how many sincerely believe in the literal existence of Zeus, etc. (I am in a similar position regarding Wicca, with which I take the second approach.) {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.81.243 (talk) 08:33, 8 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I have heard that even when paganism was ubiquitous, few worshippers believed in a literal existence of the gods, in the way monotheists seem to do today. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 11:44, 8 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Original research from me! I think a lot as to whether one can metaphysically speak of predication abstracted from any synchronicity—i.e. whether to be has some meaning apart from that indicated by is or was. I forget who I was reading, but I remember a philosopher using βε as the "time-independent copula" while discussing this, which I thought justified the entire effort of course. Remsense 🌈 论 23:54, 7 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, we could go deep into metaphysics if we wanted to, but that's not my point. My preferences here reflect my intuition about how people actually use the language (in this register, etc), not any claims about the ontological status of tense logic or the truth or falsity of presentism or the block universe. --Trovatore (talk) 00:10, 8 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Just on the persistence of fame: An expression beloved of sports commentators is "a former great". I'd argue that if their greatness came from whatever they achieved in their careers, that greatness never goes away, not even if every record they broke has since been surpassed. Their fame, on the other hand, is indeed a fleeting thing. Sometimes we see people being inducted into some Hall of Fame, and most onlookers say "Who's that?". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 02:42, 8 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Saying "a former great athlete" is kind of condescending. Saying "a great former athlete" works. In the case of the original example here, I think they're trying to say too much in a single sentence. The subject was an elephant. Past tense. He was famous for such-and-such. Past tense. He may still be famous. Present tense. It might be instructive to see how this kind of thing was handled in the Jumbo article. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 06:39, 8 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Greatness is a hard thing to quantify anyway and gets more ridiculous the more you delve into it. Even Babe Ruth blew it sometimes - was he not a great baseball player in those specific moments? If not, when did the greatness come back? If has was great Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, but lousy on Saturday and okay for the rest of the week, do we still call him great that Friday? Human speech is often very imprecise and opinions add another layer of imprecision. Matt Deres (talk) 18:02, 10 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Also, greatness may be temporally relative. Standards in sports tend to improve over time, so a set of performances in the 1950s that were great in their era might be very ordinary today – context is everything. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.81.243 (talk) 18:11, 10 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Greatness is not some precise mathematical formula, rather it's common consent by the relevant community. Every sportsperson fails their way to success. Mozart and Beethoven and their ilk wrote some dreadful rubbish. Kubrick directed some duds. The list is endless. Their greatness comes not because they were always perfect, but because they succeeded despite their failures. As for historical context: running a four-minute mile is pretty commonplace now, but the first person to do it (Roger Bannister), who did it at a time when it was considered close to impossible, will always be the one who showed the world it was indeed possible. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:11, 10 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

June 11

Strange use of "that"

I'm reading John Williams's novel Stoner, finally. A great read, indeed. In chapter 3, on page 42 of my edition (Vintage Classics) is this sentence:

He never went into that room that he did not glance at the seat he had once occupied, and he was always slightly surprised to discover that he was not there.

I had no trouble understanding the meaning from the context. I'm sure the bolded bit means "without glancing", but I'm wondering why he didn't just say that. Three fewer words, one fewer syllable, concision and all that. I get that writers decide for themselves exactly which words and expressions they use, but I've never come across this form of words before, unless it follows a verb, e.g. "I knew that he did not glance ...". Is it attested?

(FYI. The novel is set in rural Missouri around the time of the First World War, and there's a bit of farmer-talk in the parts with dialogue, but this was the narrator speaking, so that won't be the explanation.) -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 01:41, 11 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You are not alone in having a problem with the construction.^[9] I think it may be due to a sloppy edit on a sentence that before went like

It was rare when he went into that room that he did not glance ...

‑‑Lambiam 10:04, 11 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I agree. But the ref you cited suggests the sentence appears in at least 2 editions. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 12:22, 11 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The sloppy edit could have been a late-moment revision by Williams that was not caught by his editor at the original publisher. ‑‑Lambiam 00:58, 12 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Speaking as a British English reader (and ex-book editor), it strikes me as a correct but markedly archaic form of expression; more familiar in the (still archaic) form "but that he did not . . . " – compare the well-known Scottish heraldic motto "Touch not the cat but a glove". I would be unsurprised to see it in an 18th century work.

Although I have not read the book I gather that the protagonist, presumably the subject here, is an assistant Professor of English, so Williams might be indicating that he thinks in the terminology of older English literature, and perhaps that he is a little affected in his mannerisms. Are other turns of phrase in the book consistent with this? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.81.243 (talk) 10:16, 11 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Not remotely. That's why this one stood out. Thinking about it more, it seems a sort of muddled version of something like "There was never a time when he went into that room that he did not glance at the seat ...". I could imagine it being a regionalism, but the narrator otherwise speaks standard AmEng. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 12:17, 11 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

June 12

Land ship

What did it mean to call a light propeller aircraft a "land ship" in 1947? The compound term landship refers to much heavier vehicles, with the common property of being unable to fly. What kind of plane was a land ship? Card Zero (talk) 13:16, 12 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Possibly to differentiate it from a seaplane or flying boat? The usual term would be landplane. The use of "ship" to describe an aircraft is WWII US pilots' slang, from whence we get gunship, which is, of course, not actually a ship. Alansplodge (talk) 14:10, 12 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Google also found me "assembly ship". Alansplodge (talk) 14:24, 12 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

June 13

Does Wikipedia have any editors who know early modern Dutch?

I appreciate that we have a page on Willem Usselincx, but in a perfect world, we would have translations of his writings in contemporary English, and in practice we must have guides for learning the period dialect. New Yorkers would appreciate the new insight into the history of our state and its politics. Shushimnotrealstooge (talk) 14:43, 13 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Are you asking if one or more Wikipedia editors could translate Willem Usselincx's 16–17th-century Dutch writings (which I gather are extensive) into modern English, or 'merely' to translate the existing contemporary (to him, I presume) English translation Further reflections on the navigation, commerce and trade, and building of the state . . . (of his book Over de zee-vaert/ Coophandel ende Neeringhe alsmede de versekeringhe vanden Staet . . . (1608)) into modern English?

Either way this would be a scholarly enterprise requiring lengthy work, and such a translation could not be hosted on Wikipedia because it would constitute Original research. It would first have to be published by a reputable publisher, after which brief quotes at most could be used here, though not by the actual translator(s) as this would constitute a Conflict of interest.

Perhaps I have misunderstood you – can you clarify what it is you are asking about, or for? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.137.14 (talk) 17:54, 13 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Should the Wiktionary distinguish between "forgive" and "absolve"?

I read this paper for school, and it makes an interesting point: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40985573

The author argues for forgiveness as a process of character growth and self-discovery, not morality, as opposed to literally overlooking the wrongs of others, citing Freud, Nietzsche, and even the Resurrection. While not the common use of the work "forgive", I want to ask the reference desk if they see it as worth mentioning. Shushimnotrealstooge (talk) 14:55, 13 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This would be a matter for Wiktionary, not Wikipedia: they are two quite separate projects.

And what do you mean by 'distinguishing between them'? Wictionary has entirely distinct entries for each word. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.137.14 (talk) 17:59, 13 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

As to the first point, I see no reason it wouldn't be appropriate to ask questions here with the intent of improving Wiktionary. After all, we answer questions here just for general knowledge, with no requirement that it be used for improving Wikipedia. --Trovatore (talk) 18:40, 13 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't understand your reference to the Resurrection. That was an event that is believed by Christians to have happened. I don't see how that connects to "literally overlooking the wrongs of others".

But on that last point, I've never understood forgiveness to be about diminishing what the other party has done. What's done is done and can't be undone. Rather, it's about the "victim" changing their attitude to the perpetrator, from hatred or a desire for revenge to acceptance and love. It's founded on the fundamental difference between who a person is and what a person does. That's why I've long believed that there's no such thing as an evil person. Or a good person, for that matter. People can and do do evil things, and the law must take its course, and the people are accountable for their actions. But, as A. J. Muste wisely said: "If I can't love Hitler, I can't love at all". Nothing in that statement says that what he perpetrated was OK. But if the doctrine of distinguishing people from their actions applies at all, we can't make an exception for special cases. The Christian version of this tenet is usually phrased as "Hate the sin but love the sinner". That's not easy, particularly when you have been personally affected. But Christians are enjoined to do it anyway. As G. K. Chesterton pointed out: "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried." -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:59, 13 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Dictionaries define words by looking at how they are used out in the wild, not what people said they should mean. Nardog (talk) 04:20, 14 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

June 14