Talk:I have a dream
Deletion debate
The following information has failed Wiktionary's deletion process.
It should not be re-entered without careful consideration.
Sum of parts. See dream#Noun. Wiktionary is not Wikiquote. Mglovesfun (talk) 12:23, 31 May 2010 (UTC)
- Common catchphrase in US. Appears in The American Heritage New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition (2005). DCDuring TALK 16:19, 31 May 2010 (UTC)
- Delete. Agree with Mglovesfun. The uſer hight Bogorm converſation 16:41, 31 May 2010 (UTC)
- Like with "bank parking lot", this often means "on a grand scale" (or whatever the wording of its definition is, I've closed it now), but often doesn't. Delete.—msh210℠ on a public computer 00:58, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
- Delete. I agree with Mglovesfun. --Actarus (Prince d'Euphor) 18:06, 3 June 2010 (UTC)
- Keep. Guys, come on - I went to the effort to provide CFI-sufficient citations for a clearly idiomatic use of the phrase which varies from the expected meaning of a sleep-related occurrence. Also, people have gone to the trouble of providing translations. bd2412 T 15:32, 5 June 2010 (UTC)
- I don't understand your rationale. What are you saying?
- That we should suspend our standards because of effort?
- That those arguing against inclusion are being unserious?
- That any attestable phrase that uses the word "dream" in the sense of "a hope", "an inspiring vision" thereby merits keeping?
- Or that all allusions (or all pretentious, misleadng, jocular, or jesting words) should be kept because they are intended to imply something about the speaker?
- DCDuring TALK 17:24, 5 June 2010 (UTC)
- I don't understand your rationale. What are you saying?
- From experience, when editors use clearly idiomatic it means it's not clearly idiomatic, so extra emphasis is needed to make people think it is. A bit like when editors use in edit summaris clearly not SoP. Mglovesfun (talk) 17:33, 5 June 2010 (UTC)
- When people hear the phrase "I have a dream" followed by a broad aspirational statement (or even merely intoned as though a broad aspirational statement is going to follow), they understand that the speaker is not referring to a dream during sleep in exactly the same way that they understand a speaker not to be referring to a literal dead horse being beaten. Furthermore, if I were to say, "I have a dream that all the spoons in the sink will be washed and put away", you would instantly understand that I was not explaining a dream during sleep, but that I was making a joke by implying that washing the spoons and putting them away was some grand aspiration, achievable only in some sort of ideal future. The joke is impossible to understand without an understanding of the idiomatic meaning of the phrase. bd2412 T 18:06, 5 June 2010 (UTC)
- Right. That's why we have Wikiquote: to be repository for expressions that might have that kind of allusive content. Are you now suggesting that any expression that bears some cultural meaning should be part of Wiktionary? For me the oeuvres of The Talking Heads, R.E.M., The Temptations, Frank Sinatra, Cole Porter, Rogers and Hammerstein, and the KJV are full of such terms. It has been suggested that we might have catchphrases, but no one has yet made a proposal to amend CFI to make it clear that we had such a consensus, nor is it clear that there is such a consensus.
- For now, I think we need to confine ourselves for the most part to denotation and skip connotation, irony, and novel metaphor.
- I could see us providing a link to Wikiquote using
{{only in}}, at least after it is modified to allow such a reference. DCDuring TALK 18:43, 5 June 2010 (UTC)- The phrase "I have a dream" would not qualify for individual inclusion in Wikiquote, except as part of the much longer quote into which it was incorporated by Martin Luther King, Jr. It is not a "catchphrase" in that sense. A person coming across this phrase being used in the jocular sense and being confused by its import would turn to a dictionary, not a book of quotes, to determine its meaning. The bigger picture is that it might be useful to people who would look for this sort of thing in a dictionary first. bd2412 T 18:51, 5 June 2010 (UTC)
- I don't think we can protect people from not getting jokes. It would be easy enough to provide a link to q:Martin Luther King, Jr.#I Have A Dream (1963). or to w:I have a dream. We also can and do keep citations for items that fail to meet CFI in the opinion of participating contributors. At some point we might have default search hit citation space as well as principal namespace. DCDuring TALK 19:11, 5 June 2010 (UTC)
- It is more than just jokes, though. The phrase is widely used in speeches and essays, and sometimes they border on whether the speaker is being serious or ironic in use of the phrase. bd2412 T 21:26, 5 June 2010 (UTC)
- I don't think we can protect people from not getting jokes. It would be easy enough to provide a link to q:Martin Luther King, Jr.#I Have A Dream (1963). or to w:I have a dream. We also can and do keep citations for items that fail to meet CFI in the opinion of participating contributors. At some point we might have default search hit citation space as well as principal namespace. DCDuring TALK 19:11, 5 June 2010 (UTC)
- The phrase "I have a dream" would not qualify for individual inclusion in Wikiquote, except as part of the much longer quote into which it was incorporated by Martin Luther King, Jr. It is not a "catchphrase" in that sense. A person coming across this phrase being used in the jocular sense and being confused by its import would turn to a dictionary, not a book of quotes, to determine its meaning. The bigger picture is that it might be useful to people who would look for this sort of thing in a dictionary first. bd2412 T 18:51, 5 June 2010 (UTC)
- When people hear the phrase "I have a dream" followed by a broad aspirational statement (or even merely intoned as though a broad aspirational statement is going to follow), they understand that the speaker is not referring to a dream during sleep in exactly the same way that they understand a speaker not to be referring to a literal dead horse being beaten. Furthermore, if I were to say, "I have a dream that all the spoons in the sink will be washed and put away", you would instantly understand that I was not explaining a dream during sleep, but that I was making a joke by implying that washing the spoons and putting them away was some grand aspiration, achievable only in some sort of ideal future. The joke is impossible to understand without an understanding of the idiomatic meaning of the phrase. bd2412 T 18:06, 5 June 2010 (UTC)
- From experience, when editors use clearly idiomatic it means it's not clearly idiomatic, so extra emphasis is needed to make people think it is. A bit like when editors use in edit summaris clearly not SoP. Mglovesfun (talk) 17:33, 5 June 2010 (UTC)
The deletion of this entry is out of process and should not stand. It says right at the top of this page, "Entries and senses should not normally be deleted in less than seven days after nomination" (with discussions often taking weeks to arrive at a correct resolution), and that time has not passed. Is there something about this entry that requires such unusual haste? The discussion is still ongoing. bd2412 T 02:00, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
- Agreed. The discussion is ongoing and not an easy consensus either way. As such, the entry should stay for a while yet. Restored. I take no position on whether it should be eventually deleted or not. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 02:30, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
Here is, I think, an example of the sort of usage which sits on the border between serious and sarcastic, which can only be properly comprehended if the idiomatic sense of this phrase is understood:
- 1995, Sidelines, vol. 2-4, p. 34:
- I have a dream that one day donors and beneficiaries will reach for one another with open hearts and open hands, and no questions asked. I have a dream that donations will flow like milk and honey and no strings attached. I have a dream that the oppressed will travel the highway of freedom in BMW's, preferably in 740s, but if need be, in 318s (as long as they have fuel injection).
This is not a neologism, and is not strictly speaking sum-of-parts because the combination implies something not conveyed by any individual parts, a grandness (perhaps grandiosity) of scale. Cheers! bd2412 T 04:22, 6 June 2010 (UTC)
In light of the phrasebook discussion, I think we should consider an appendix for phrases like this one, falling short of qualifying for individual inclusion in Wikiquote, but having a particular connotation that is only fully comprehensible in historical context. bd2412 T 17:42, 8 June 2010 (UTC)
Keep, clearly goes beyond a mere quote as a literary device. DAVilla 11:27, 20 July 2010 (UTC)
Delete, I think the search function would nicely bring up Wikipedia for the MLK speech: I Have a Dream, where it is well covered (and MLK's speech certainly inspired many writers and speakers). But otherwise, it's just noun sense 2 of dream (a hope, a wish). We have a dream, she had a dream, he had a dream, they had a dream... Where do we draw the line? I don't see any idiomatic, figurative, or even "set phrase" of the expression. The author of the Sidelines quote could just as well have said, "I hope that..." or "I wish that", or "I would be wonderful if", or "It would be my dream if". Also, I don't think the phrase necessarily means "on a grand scale" - a child could use it such as "I have a dream about getting ice cream after basketball practice." In other words, any grandness or altruism in the phrase is only detectable by context, not by the phrase itself. Facts707 21:35, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
Delete, the phrase can surely be shortened to I dream without loss of meaning to the sentence it is in, indicating it is not idiomatic. SpinningSpark 19:04, 10 February 2011 (UTC)
deleted. Quite similar to the mistakes were made case, there is no idiomaticity within the phrase itself. -- Prince Kassad 19:33, 10 February 2011 (UTC)
I have made the entry an {{only in}}-redirect to Wikiquote, which some proposed above. - -sche (discuss) 18:13, 20 November 2012 (UTC)
Translations
Although I have some doubts about their accuracy (did other countries really adopt the idiom of a US civil rights hero?), here are the translations which were in the entry: - -sche (discuss) 18:13, 20 November 2012 (UTC)
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