Talk:sick

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RFD for the noun sense "Sick people in general as a group." Second nomination. This nomination also applies to any English adjective used nominally in this way, as this can be done with virtually any adjective, especially ones that apply to people in a certain condition but can also apply to other things. I included a few examples I've found of entries that have this, but I probably missed a lot, and that's an unfortunate remark for me to have to make here.

To give you an idea of how repeatable this is, you could form the rich, the wealthy, the snotty, the good, the bad, the ugly, the fake, the real, the ridiculous, the stupid, the smart, the happy, the curious, and the list goes on. Need I name more? Should we have a noun form for all those entries, and many more? PseudoSkull (talk) 02:35, 7 September 2020 (UTC)Reply

Previous discussion (with links to other previous discussions): Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2015/October#Nominalized Adjectives. —Granger (talk · contribs) 19:20, 7 September 2020 (UTC)Reply

I'm sympathetic to the view that because any adjective can be so nominalized, it's a matter for WikiGrammar. (I think we should mention such things on our "About English" / "English entry guidelines" pages, until WikiGrammar exists as its own project or namespace.) So, weak delete. Any relevant details—one mentioned in the BP thread is that they take plural verbs—could be added to the relevant sense of the ("Used before an adjective, indicating all things (especially persons) described by that adjective"), and illustrated by usexes in the adjective sections. (Citations could also illustrate cases where an adjective is relatively common without "the", e.g. in headlines: "Poor to die without new aid bill", "Irish head to polls tomorrow" etc.) - -sche (discuss) 18:14, 9 September 2020 (UTC)Reply

There are also cases of terms having one POS being used as having another POS. For example, German adjectives can also be used as adverbs: hoffnungslos verloren means “hopelessly lost”, and adjectives can be nominalized: ein Abgelehnter is “a rejected person”, and das Lustige is “the funny side” of something. In other languages, such as Turkish, semantic plurals are often morphologically unmarked: omlet yapmak için yumurta kırmak gerekir (“you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”). If something like this is a regular and predictable feature of a language, we should not register it for individual instances.

We should delete them, but is there a systematic way of finding all instances of English adjectives listed as nouns with a collectibe sense? The collective noun senses of deaf and poor are categorized as pluralia tantum, those of sick and tone-deaf as collective nouns (without stating that they function as plurals), and that of blind is not categorized at all. Of the noun forms produced above by PseudoSkull, I think haphazardly, happy and wealthy also have collective senses listed, so there must be plenty more.  --Lambiam 13:08, 10 September 2020 (UTC)Reply

Delete. Ultimateria (talk) 16:42, 10 September 2020 (UTC)Reply

Delete. Equinox ◑ 18:15, 10 September 2020 (UTC)Reply

Somewhat reluctant Delete all as a regular feature of English that does not need explaining separately each time, unless anyone can demonstrate why we should include some but not others. Mihia (talk) 22:13, 10 September 2020 (UTC)Reply

It is difficult. These are what I usually call 'systematic polysemy', i.e., a sense extension that can be "extended" in all cases. Other examples are "room" meaning "the people in a room" (the whole room burst out laughing, the whole concert hall burst out laughing, the whole garden shed burst out laughing - must've been a good joke), and "Chinese" meaning the food or a meal of such food (last night we had Chinese / Japanese / Korean / Mongolian / Albanian ?). Most other dictionaries go down the path of including specific entries for the most common ones, e.g. the unemployed, the jobless, the rich, the poor, the blessed, but not others that are also pretty common, the ultrarich, the megawealthy, and definitely not ones that are less common, the happy, the impecunious, the unconcerned, not even the meek though they shall inherit the earth, eventually, apparently. But, how do they test for such commonality, and what is their cut-off point? I suspect they use native-speaker intuition and a sense of what people are likely to want to look up. It is a bit of a can of worms. One possible way forward would be to institute a high number of cites to meet CFI for cases of systematic polysemy - say 20 independent cites - which would potentially put off nutbags who want to create noun defs for every adjective in the dictionary. - Sonofcawdrey (talk) 19:36, 20 September 2020 (UTC)Reply

Delete all. This is a grammatical, not a lexical, phenomenon, and grammar tends to be complicated and messy. It isn't limited to just simple adjectives: phrases can do this too. Do we want entries for "the extremely wealthy", "the merely sick", "the recently widowed", etc.? Note that these have adverbial modifiers, not adjectival, so it's not a modification of the adjective as a noun, but of the adjective before it's converted to a noun. In fact, these nominalized adjectival phrases can take adjectival modifiers, too: "not all of the recently widowed are old". There are also compound adjectives: "the poor and lowly" "the sick and dying", etc. Chuck Entz (talk) 22:46, 20 September 2020 (UTC)Reply

This is a good point, especially regarding "widowed", which shows that speakers can even do this with words that seem to be verb forms (or at least, don't seem to meet any other tests of adjectivity), like google books:"the killed were", google books:"the recently killed". Noun all the words, and verb "noun"! (Actually, how do we feel about that, the use of any word as a verb? It inflects, e.g. "nouned", which means there's somewhere more reason to give such things their own POS section than there is with the tone-deaf.) - -sche (discuss) 15:39, 26 September 2020 (UTC)Reply

Keep all but prefix with 'the' - the poor, the sick, ... -- Dentonius (my politics | talk) 18:08, 4 October 2020 (UTC)Reply

Delete all. J3133 (talk) 18:09, 4 October 2020 (UTC)Reply

Delete all. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 18:51, 4 October 2020 (UTC)Reply

Delete all. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 06:13, 12 October 2020 (UTC)Reply

Several more entries which have noun senses like this that will presumably need to be deleted, if we decide that such things are to be deleted: happy, unemployed, jobless, living, dying, pre-dead(!), dead, wealthy, well-to-do, wicked, and wounded (compare walking wounded which has no adjective section). (I added headers for those.) Also old. An interesting case is young, which can mean both "people who are young" and "young or immature offspring (especially of an animal)", where the second feels a bit more idiomatic to me; I'm not sure what to do there. I would suggest that we should add "nounal" usexes to the relevant adjectives if these nouns are deleted. (By the way, left and right have partially similar senses, but they have more merit, IMO.) A lot of ethnicity / nationality terms also have senses like this; what do we want to do with them? E.g. Irish, Scottish, English, Manx, Welsh, French, Swiss, Abenaki. - -sche (discuss) 05:56, 7 October 2020 (UTC)Reply

It is indeed a complete can of worms, as someone said above, as to on what grounds include some but not others. "Of course" we should keep the "young of an animal" sense, which is not (exclusively) an example of the "the + adj" formula, e.g. you can say "her young" or "these young" -- and yet equally one can find "some unemployed" or "these unemployed" used to mean "some/these unemployed people". So ... Mihia (talk) 00:14, 8 October 2020 (UTC)Reply

I've started to make these deleted, moving nounal usexes up into the adjective sections. I have also retained the translations, the inverse of retaining adjective translations of things that in English are only nouns, as on cork and brass, as DCDuring and I discussed elsewhere once. - -sche (discuss) 17:27, 6 December 2020 (UTC)Reply