Stock Phrases: do we want or need them?

I asked this before, but there was no real response: are there any plans along the lines of splitting off Stock Phrases as its own site, similar to what was done with Fetish Fuel? While they may not be tropes, they're still interesting (to me at least) to catalog.

edited 3rd Aug '11 7:59:48 PM by nrjxll

@Rhyme:

Eddie said this at least twice. If a trope is named after a Stock Phrase, and people are wikilinking it for the phrase instead of the trope, then that is misuse of the trope. It is, in fact, the same kind of misuse as people linking character-named tropes in reference to the character instead of the trope. E.g: The Dumbledore and The Umbridge, both of which were subject to this kind of misuse and renamed to fix it.

However, applying that argument as a blanket statement against all tropes related to a Stock Phrase is ... controversial, at best.

edited 3rd Aug '11 9:33:42 PM by Stratadrake

That last point is what I'm calling on. I'd at least like something showing that the majority of tropes listed have significant misuse. To merely claim they cause misuse needs to be proven.

I agree, we don't have any undisputable empirical evidence to question the Word of Mod by.

Should we start a Special Efforts project dedicated to investigating which (pre-existing) Stock Phrase tropes are being treated like a phrase instead of a trope and to what extent? (I know Sure, Why Not? has some....)

Actually... that was to Eddie. It's in the sense that he can take a lot of actions, but he can't make misuse happen when it's just claimed so far. It's something that has to actually be proven. Then the claim has merit.

It's a standard I would apply to anyone though.

edited 3rd Aug '11 10:15:38 PM by DragonQuestZ

Yeah, theoretical misuse is not the same as actual documentation via checking wikilinks.

edited 3rd Aug '11 10:21:32 PM by Stratadrake

Writing the article as if it is about a line detracts from the thing that inspires the lines use — the trope, the thing the wiki is about.

A line of dialog is a very poor name for a trope because it doesn't fit well into a sentence. Which is what you need to do with the name of a trope.

Dialog-like titles (and they are titles, not names) have low inbound linkage. Primarily because people have trouble using this line of dialog as the name of a trope in a sentence.

People who read the article superficially, and Bog knows we have a few people who do that, get the idea that examples are wanted of where the line has been used, regardless of the reason it was used, which is thing we're interested in. So you get examples that have nothing to do with the trope simply because people have heard the line, which could have been uttered for any number of reasons.

Descriptions should definitely be fixed of course. Any data to back up the other claims? If so, I'll be behind renaming most of these.

Right; we're trying to request past-or-present documentation of the misuse in question, not just echoes of the same rhetorical judgement over and over. The judgement is clear, but it's not absolute — not every trope named from a line of dialogue gets this kind of misuse, there's room for exception. (Like, anyone want to investigate Luke, I Am Your Father?)

The reason so many tropes seem to have "dialog-like titles" is that phrases taken from dialogue tend to be easily remembered, particularly if the trope really concerns dialogue. I'm also gravely worried about how the line will be drawn as to what trope names are "dialog-like"; right now it seems to be based on one person's say-so. And "doesn't fit well into a sentence" isn't even necessarily true of titles that are lines of dialogue.

In my opinion, the worst "dialog-like" titles are not the ones that don't get linked enough, but the ones that get used too often because they're such conventional figures of speech that they get linked and potholed from hundreds of other entries that don't really have anything to do with the trope. I Am Not Making This Up was one major example, and I Got Better is probably still bad about this.

Why Don't Ya Just Shoot Him? was terrible in that regard as well.

On the other end of the scale, what about, say, Luke, I Am Your Father? It's a line of dialogue with explicit references to the speaker/listener, but at the same time it's specific enough that it's not easily potholed as a generic phrase.

Or (while we're on the subject of Star Wars) You Have Failed Me? It's another line of dialogue with two persons' pronouns, and a good 1,000 wikilinks. Is it misused? I don't particularly expect much, but I haven't actually checked, either.

I still say renaming should be case by case, but I have an idea of how to repurpose Stock Phrases. Instead it could be a predefined message in descriptions for common lines that accompany tropes, regardless of the name.

• Brain Bleach: When lampshaded, someone often says something like "This cannot be unseen".
• Really 17 Years Old: Situations after the fact often have the line "They said they were eighteen!".

edited 17th Aug '11 5:29:56 PM by DragonQuestZ

A subpage for stock quotes related to a trope.

If there are a lot of them, but most would have just one or two.

I like the idea of the stock phrases spinoff site.

Or this idea

Right now, we have a bunch of TRS threads about reworking tropes that are stock phrases, and seeing if they should be cut or expanded. If you see any, please give some input.

Eddie had it right the first time. Cut out all the stock phrases. There's little purpose to these cataloged bits of dialog and they lack any meaning.

It seems to me that being described as a stock phrase is hurting Where's the Fun in That?, which should be a legitimate trope but good examples (like this one from Willow) haven't been added because they don't use the exact phrase.

That's why I'm putting some of these on TRS to see what can be turned into proper tropes, and what can be cut.

Would it make sense to create subpages for stock phrases associated with certain tropes?

Seems like something that would sound natural enough to note in the description.

+1 to . In the description is fine IMO.

Exactly. And this isn't even restricted to "dialogue-like" (by which im assuming we mean titles that are based on lines of dialogue associated with the trope in question) titles- It Gets Better is misused to mean "I haven't got to the best bit yet". So I.think a blanket ban on titles like that won't achieve anything. What's important is not having tropes which are just "a character says X".