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Latest comment: 8 years ago22 comments8 people in discussion
Sole definition: "Back then, at the time referred to in the past."
It is possible to find uses with will, would and could that demonstrate that the definition is incorrect in excluding future deixis. That being so, the term is SoP. DCDuringTALK00:32, 3 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
As you know, the most basic time terms are hard to define. At least this definition conveyed to me that only half of the conceptual time line was supposedly referred to.
Obviously we have more to say about past events, so it would hardly be a surprise that much more usage (90+%) of this term is about the past. DCDuringTALK11:56, 3 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
Hmm… the entry may be necessary for translations. Many related languages disagree on which prepositions to use for something, but perhaps that’s a sign that our definitions are inadequate. --Romanophile♞ (contributions) 12:29, 3 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
The aren't synonymous because at refers to points (events) and in refers to spaces with extent (intervals). I would hope that our definition at those terms makes that clear. Learning that and similar mostly lexical things about English prepositions goes a long way toward constructing more native-like speech and texts, even helping with phrasal verbs, sometimes eliminating the need to look up their meaning. Determiners and articles are similarly worth studying to the same end. DCDuringTALK18:12, 3 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
I find that substituting during for at in the usage examples leads me to expressions that I would never use:
At six o'clock
*During six o'clock
?During the six o'clock hour
Simultaneous is even worse, not even being the correct part of speech.
That is, I think it is not an accurate definition for the English I hear and speak. Perhaps in another time or far, far away....
But, the event vs period distinction is relative to the context and sometimes just PoV. I could say "During the arrival of the train I could see people running next to it" taking the arrival, normally a point event, as something with duration. I could say "at daybreak" when a daybreak clearly takes some time. At D-Day the outcome of the war was still in doubt vs. During D-Day there was not as much loss of life as feared.DCDuringTALK21:57, 3 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
Au contraire, it is a powerful tool for rooting out carelessly worded definitions. It is a minimum condition for all except non-gloss definitions, though not sufficient to make a good definition. DCDuringTALK22:28, 3 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
Would you rather have something that is clearly wrong (wrongly clear?) or something that is hard to decipher, but correct?
The simplest, most common words in any language are often the hardest to define. What simpler or equally simple words does one have recourse to?
They often require non-gloss definitions, which are rarely simple.
Someone looking up such a simple word probably has a relatively subtle problem, so simplicity is not necessarily the principal figure of merit for the entry.
This is all very nice (I can agree with the relativity of point vs interval), but it doesn't change one iota on the fact that a reader who doesn't come across this conversation has no way of telling the difference between "at the time" and "in the time" from what our defs say either at "at", "in" or "time", so Romanophile's remark about the possible necessity of keeping the entry for the sake of translations remains quite pertinent. --Droigheann (talk) 00:11, 4 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
No. I didn't mean it as in 'go hurry and fix the "at" entry so we can delete the "at the time" one'. But as long as the former entry isn't fixed, and you admit it does need fixing, what harm does keeping the latter one? --Droigheann (talk) 13:54, 4 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
Entries for transparent (SoP) entries may (we have no statistics) lead to learners failing to consciously learn about the meaning and usage of the components.
What approach to EFL teachers and course materials take?
I think that they would offer this at their entry for time, at which various phrases, including prepositional phrases, would be available in close proximity for comparison. We don't offer that. At best we have alphabetical listings of derived terms without any clue as to meaning without clicking through to whatever of those have links. And once one has clicked through, one has lost the ability to compare. BTW, I have replaced the erroneous definition for at referenced above with a non-gloss definition more or less in line with LDOCE and COBUILD. DCDuringTALK16:29, 4 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
