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Latest comment: 10 years ago11 comments6 people in discussion
rfd-sense: Deaf people considered as a group. This is the adjective not the noun. We don't list such senses at poor, rich, disabled, blind (and so on) as nouns because they are adjectives preceded by 'the'. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:25, 8 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
Lemming-shmemming. I find it hard to discern a boundary between the includable and the nonincludable (as nouns) of such uses of adjectives, other than the nounal introducing a sense not present in the adjectival.
But CGEL has the following types of adjective modifiers as eligible for "fused-head" constructions, of which this could be considered an example: superlative forms of adjectives; definite comparative forms of adjectives; ordinal adjectives; modifiers denoting color, composition, or provenance; adjectives denoting basic physical properties, eg, age, size; and modifier-heads with special interpretations.
Of these, only the last class seem to me to possibly merit inclusion. Syntactically, they are almost always only plural (but see accused and deceased) and only the, and not even demonstratives among determiners, can occur with these adjectives. They include nationalities and ethnicities ("the French" ) , certain adjectives ("the rich", "the poor", etc), and certain past participles ("the unemployed"}, and denominal -ed forms ("the gifted"). All of these apply to people and at least some animals or to sentient beings, and are equivalent to "those who are ". But there are others ("the impossible", "the immoral"), which are equivalent to "that which is ".
It was one of CGEL's examples. It is derived at one remove from employ anyway. And employed works the same, though it's not as common. DCDuringTALK18:53, 8 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
But what about unemployment? Is it un-+employment, even though un- doesn't normally attach to nouns? Or is it unemployed+ment with deletion of the -ed? —Angr20:18, 8 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
I'd say the latter, considering how sociology and economics works: first there was a non-negligible number of unemployed who surely created problems for the society, then you needed a word for this phenomenon. That said, I think the first sense in unemployment came after the second. --biblbroksдискашн21:47, 8 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
Judging from this Google N-gram, the development might have been as follows: "employment" (a. 1777), "the employed" (sometimes as fused head) (a. 1836), "the unemployed" (sometimes as fused head) (a. 1894), "unemployment" (a. 1931). Obviously I didn't analyze each use to determine whether it was labor or workers that were employed or not, but many, possibly most of the instances seemed to be about labor. DCDuringTALK22:54, 8 May 2013 (UTC)Reply
Regarding words like this and Irish (see Talk:Irish), I just noticed that we do have the following definition at ]: "Used before an adjective, indicating all things (especially persons) described by that adjective." - -sche(discuss)00:18, 10 June 2014 (UTC)Reply
We are a descriptive dictionary; it doesn't matter who wrote it as long as it can be cited in durably archived media, which it evidently can. BigDom15:34, 5 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
Yes, I am aware of that; I was mentioning it because it needs context labels and possibly a usage note Sorry, I thought you were replying to my second comment. Yes, I would rather not count a mistake by a non-native speaker as a citation, but if it acceptable, then fine, I don't care. That would mean many mistakes by non-native speakers would suddenly become eligible for inclusion, though. Kaixinguo~enwiktionary (talk) 16:12, 5 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
I have no view on this particular case, but generally speaking we should not be using citations from non-native speakers whose English is seen to be poor. Neither should we be using citations from anyone when it is clear that the usage is in error, unless it is a common error, in which case it should be labelled as such. All kinds of crap may be "cited in durably archived media". There needs to be editorial judgement exercised by educated native speakers, otherwise we may as well just hand over to Urban Dictionary. Mihia (talk) 19:56, 6 June 2018 (UTC)Reply
