Misuse is off the scale!: If You Know What I Mean

Pronoun-specific redirects are clutter. Shortening it to Made A Double Entendre could work.

Or, if you want a self-referential title, maybe Insert Double Entendre Here? *bag over head*

But we still have to do something on the massive number of sinkholes. It needs to direct to somewhere relevant....

Oh and BTW, crowner for brainstorming.

edited 7th May '11 7:02:53 PM by Stratadrake

Okay, what's wrong with people potholing to If You Know What I Mean? If they've written a genuine Double Entendre, then the act of linking it to If You Know What I Mean makes it an example of If You Know What I Mean.

And, yeah, Nudge Nudge Wink Wink and variations thereof would be much better than just Nudge.

^ No, for two reasons.

1 - The words editors pothole it underneath constitute a Double Entendre. If You Know What I Mean means adding an additional comment to point it out.

2 - It's supposed to be an in-universe trope.

Correct usage:

—> Bob (to Alice): "Maybe I could drop by later and help with your 'biology homework'? If You Know What I Mean..."

Incorrect usage:

—> Bob (to Alice): "Maybe I could drop by later and help with your 'biology homework'?"

PS: The Bible and Characters.The Bible have one wick apiece, both of which are some manner of misuse. So I guess it's safe to say that misuse has officially reached the level "of Biblical proportions". *rimshot*

edited 7th May '11 9:45:31 PM by Stratadrake

If you pothole to "Nudge", however, it's just like Yum Yum and Hello Boys, though. You can sort of get it by Wild Mass Guessing before you click on the link, but the link actually leads to a flagged article. The people who will guess (and even then, they'd be guessing) what it means before they click are a minority.

I don't even think that the trope in its current state should be on the wiki. It's just having something "clever" and "witty" to pothole to to make up for the fact that they're shoehorning in a Double Entendre. It's sort of like I Am Not Making This Up, but it makes us look like complete and unprecedented perverts rather than idiots who won't believe anything unless they're told that they're not making it up, at which point they believe it.

It's not exactly the same, IANMTU and So Yeah's main problem was that they could be used at the end of every sentence, without any purpose.

This is closer to Sarcasm Mode, or Stealth Pun, in that it helps to highligt the invocation of a specific joke form, just in case you didn't get it, thus it makes the text more clear by replacing the usual non-verbal clues with potholes.

So... it seems to me that tropers are using this for meta-level moments of You Know What I Mean , and not for in universe examples.

How much of a problem is that?

Could we just accept this as being about meta-level occurrences?

edited 9th May '11 10:03:56 AM by FastEddie

There are two ways to interpret pothole links on this trope:

There's the Heh Heh, You Said "X" interpretation, where the fact that it got potholed there is a meta-comment of "I just made a Double Entendre". This isn't far off the definition, but it's not the actual definition either.

The other, literal interpretation requires the pothole text to match the underlying Wiki Word. E.g. "ambiguously important artifact" equals MacGuffin. This interpretation makes it misuse, because when somebody potholes a Double Entendre to IYKWIM, the pothole text is a Double Entendre, but IYKWIM is not. At least Incredibly Lame Pun had the excuse that the pothole text was, in fact, an actual pun.

edited 8th May '11 8:24:18 PM by Stratadrake

Another problem is, when we quote someone saying "If you know What I Mean", it ruins the quote because, the thing is, they didn't SAY Nudge! I think that Nudge Nudge Wink Wink Say No More, while it is long, (which could discourage misuse) it's better than Nudge, because it at least has an obvious implication of something, just like the original name,

edited 9th May '11 3:04:35 PM by TorchicBlaziken

^ Another reason applying the custom title was a bad idea, because when a character does use the Stock Phrase, it mangles their quote.

Not to mention that with the massive quantity of misuse, spotting cases like this is almost impossible.

Ok, I think it's time to execute the winning option.

Oh, and if redirects keep their custom titles, someone should fix the custom title back, if it will be a redirect of what it was misused for, we don't need to avoid that form of misuse anymore.

edited 17th May '11 1:47:01 AM by EternalSeptember

I'd say to keep Nudge as the article with the definition, but move the IYKWIM redirect to Double Entendre.

Actually, using If You Know What I Mean as a redirect to Double Entendre is a good choice. We don't have to deal with all of those wicks, and the definition people are using anyways fits this better.

...And smash that custom title to bits.

edited 17th May '11 7:24:32 PM by chihuahua0

Bump?

I like Madrugada's suggestion of "I Made A Double Entendre".

Eddies suggested a noun or nominative phrase, so I'll throw out the possibility of "Entendre Indication".

Or perhaps "Supplemental Entendre Indication"

edited 22nd May '11 5:44:01 AM by Fryonic

My inclination would be to use If You Know What I Mean as defined: in-universe pointing out of a Double Entendre. For potholing, use If You Know What I Mean if it's an additional statement, but use Double Entendre if you're potholing the entendre itself.

eg, "Alice offered to help Bob with his 'biology homework', if you catch my drift" or "Alice offered to help Bob with his 'biology homework'" would be correct, but "Alice offered to help Bob with his 'biology homework'" would not.

Yeah, it means a ton of work, but that's what Wiki Magic is for.

Edit — Also, I really hate the custom title thing. Even typing [[IfYouKnowWhatIMean If You Know What I Mean]] doesn't keep it from getting autocorrected to "Nudge". At this point I think it's literally impossible to have text saying "If You Know What I Mean" bluelinked to the article of that name.

edited 23rd May '11 11:03:49 AM by NativeJovian

^ Hint: Custom title matching is case-sensitive — If You Know What I Mean renders fine.

The only problem with defining IYKWIM as the additional remark instead of the Double Entendre is that we've still got an estimate of 90 percent misuse — in other words, over four thousand wikilinks which are using it wrong.

In a sense the issue becomes, "descriptive" versus "prescriptive" action? If we want the current title to reflect how it's actually being used in practice, redirecting said title to the correct trope for its de facto usage means that the 90 percent estimate magically becomes correct usage, and we only have to worry about fixing the remaining 10 percent (which, to be fair, is still a good five hundred wikilinks).

edited 23rd May '11 1:21:35 PM by Stratadrake

I'm not a fan of leaving something wrong because fixing it would be too much work. We don't have to make a massive concerted effort to fix ever wick at once; we just have to decide that it's official policy to use it the correct way and let Wiki Magic slowly do the work for us. Maybe start a Special Efforts thread just to get the word out that, yes, If You Know What I Mean refers to the additional comment, and potholes without an additional comment should be linked to Double Entendre.

I'd also vote to take the custom title off at the same time.

Anyways, it's time to execute the leading crowner option.

I'll redirect the page to Double Entendre, someone whould make a new page for the originally intended use of the trope.

You're doing this backward. First you have to have the new page to copy the description onto, then you have to copy all of the subpages, move their links if they have them, then cutlist the old subpages, then request the discussion page to be moved, or in this case merged, then you have to reassign all the redirects, then go through the indexes and remove/change the old title, and then redirect the old page to where it should go. You can do the steps in between in any order you want, but if you do the last thing first then all the other steps become a lot harder to execute.

Oh, and you should also remove the custom tittle at some point too.

edited 7th Jun '11 7:46:42 AM by Killomatic

I support getting rid of the redirect for Nudge. It's ridiculous.

Not only does a single nudge not actually convey the trope, but it can easily be confused for the book of the same name.

Drive by comment - I don't care too much what the solution ends up being as long as it gets rid of Nudge as a primary title. It's awkward and awful and unclear.

It's already gone.

Can we get rid of the automatic change to Nudge?

Finally. Nudge was a very annoying replacement title with more problems than solutions. It's a mistake that shouldn't be made again.

Is there any other issues that we need to address?

I say "If You Know What I Mean" is still a bad name for this trope, because it encourages misuse. Misuse of the "pothole to here for any Double Entendre ever" variety, since the trope itself is specifically about people hanging a lampshade on their double entendre.