Stock Phrases: do we want or need them?

Sure. Verbs, adverbs, adverb-verb pairs, nouns, adjectives, adjective-noun pairs, gerunds. Just not dialog, or character names.

Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty

Taking post #73 into account, I'm thinking that we should make use of the policy of Redirects Are Free to the fullest extent possible:

1. If a Stock Phrase, paged or not, is utilized a majority of the time in an already cataloged Trope, we use the phrase as a redirect to the proper Trope after an examples check and merge.
   • If the phrase is used in a specific sub-circumstance said majority of the time and that sub-circumstance is not presently cataloged, the potential Sub-Trope is to be run through YKTTW as per #3 below.
2. If a phrase is not utilized in an already cataloged Trope but has its own page, then that page should be examined to see if the phrase indicates or invokes a at-the-time uncatalogued Trope. If so, then the description should be modified to describe the Trope rather than the Phrase, prune examples that are not descriptive enough, and indicate that it Needs A Better Name by referring it to the TRS. (We could have a subcategory of "NABN" for "Dialogue Phrase Name".)
   • If not, it may be subject to deletion.
3. If the phrase is on the list of Other Stock Phrases, it is examined and, if it seems to be describing a Trope, then it gets taken to YKTTW.
   • If the description has Pot Holes, then the pot holes are examined to determine if the Trope invoked by the Stock Phrase is one of the Pot Holed Tropes. If so, the phrase becomes a redirect per #1.

Of course, this is a major undertaking. Perhaps a Policy Page can be written and linked to on the Stock Phrase page.

edited 29th Jun '11 8:14:16 PM by DonaldthePotholer

Ketchum's corollary to Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced tactic is indistinguishable from blind luck.

I'd say stock phrases fit tropes, as much as any other trope. Some stock phrase even come in the form of shout outs...but I doubt we're cutting those too. Are we?

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If we do wind up launching a campaign to rename tropes names after their associated stock phases, would we be examining them individually for their potential to confuse, or requiring the rename even if everything else we can think of is less clear?

For example, You Wont Get Away With This isn't just a line associated with a trope, it's a line I've never heard in any context that isn't the trope or a reference to it, making it fairly immune to incorrect use. I personally can't think of a way to rename it that wouldn't, at best, cause someone to say "Oh, you mean like when the hero says 'You won't get away with this?'".

Man, what is with this site trying to be "respectable" or "formal" or whatever the hell "we're" going for?! D8; First we rename Just Bugs Me to the stupidest name in existence; we lose the "strike-through" tag because of supposed abuse; Fetish Fuel is taken to it's own wiki because people who can't handle other people's odd fetishes were stupid enough to browse the Fetish Fuel page; Troper Tales is getting changed too. And now, we must get rid of Stock Phrases because they're a cliche? ._.

Why not get rid of ALL cliche tropes while we're at it then? Next thing you know, Wild Mass Guessing is axed because of "too many silly answers not enough SERIOUS RESPECTABLE" guesses.

Seriously, we don't need to axe, rename, retool, or whatever to Stock Phrases. D8 They're fine as they are! Can't we leave things as they are, for at least longer than a month? I surely want and need Stock Phrases.

IS SOMEONE GONNA PUSH THE FREAKIN' CART?!

Fetish Fuel was taken to its own wiki because Tropers proved to be irresponsible about it. The people on that wiki have proven to be even more irresponsible, so perhaps outright erasure would have been the right thing to do...

Which is the exact reason this won't work out. The site keeps on changing but the community at large isn't.

Most tropers don't use the fora or even know what a TRS is. They Wiki Walk for a bit , maybe check the guide lines, Get Known and then start listing tropes.

Changing the website won't do anything if they community isn't willing to change. Except maybe irritate more and more people, I'm Pro-keeping some stock phrases like Japanese Stock Phrases as that's really useful, in fact it's also in the Japanese Useful Notes index but some need to be cut. I'm just saying.

edited 30th Jun '11 12:32:40 AM by Vyctorian

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Fetish Fuel gave the community a stage for the most irresponsible to post some disturbing stuff. Break the stage and they have to sing on the ground. Much harder to see, hear, or care.

We renamed It Just Bugs Me! because people seemed to think it was a soapbox to complain on. The new name is much better at it's intended meaning: a place to clear up confusion.

If you're going to use the previous changes as reason for your new decision, I see no reason to just go through with this one as Eddie wants; the majority of decisions were unpopular but "good for the site".

Now, I think case-by-base is the only way this can work. Look at each Stock Phrase. Ask yourself: is there a valid trope behind it? If so, is the current name suitable? How prone is it to misuse? If the answer to these questions if "yes", "no" and "quite"; it's time to take it to TRS.

Stock Phrase versus line-of-dialogue tropes are a thorny issue but share a common theme: Potential to be misused by editors any time that particular combination of words comes up, whether the underlying trope applies or not.

... And one of the first things I was ever told in TRS is that "potential" for misuse is not itself an argument for renaming. It is a cause for concern, yes....

However, on a more practical note Stock Phrase and line-of-dialogue articles are far too many to force an all-encompassing Word of Mod upon. We have hundreds — no, thousands of articles whose titles involve personal pronouns, form complete sentences, or are otherwise based on a line of dialogue or Stock Phrase: That's What She Said, Man, I Feel Like a Woman, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?, You Know What You Did, I Lied, No One Could Survive That!, My God, What Have I Done? ... if we wanted to document every last one of them across the wiki then we should put that list somewhere on the Administrivia section. Fair warning that it's gonna be huge.

But I do agree with the notion that if a Stock Phrase article starts decaying into "list of fiction where the phrase gets uttered", that's really close to People Say Things.

edited 30th Jun '11 1:14:27 AM by Stratadrake

An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.

Thank You Fairy Red, That's what I've been trying to say in the past few threads about this.

It's as if every website & company is turning into You Tube 2010.

edited 30th Jun '11 2:47:07 AM by JusticeColde

^ That's nice, I guess.

^^ A fair point; the real question, then, is there misuse? I think that the potential for misuse, however (combined with other criteria), is grounds to at least make an official TRS thread for a Stock Phrases trope. Alone, it's not grounds for a rename. But it is a decent method of filtering out Stock Phrases for possible Repair Shopping.

On a side-note, I will say that I do not think it is worth considering "should we redo Stock Phrases", since it is Eddie's decision. Rather, it is a better idea to consider this: "we are redoing Stock Phrases; how should we go about doing so?"

I also vote for checking on a case-by-case basis rather than bringing out the rusty ax. Phrases that are indubitably the "face" of a trope should stay, either as full trope pages or as redirects.

edited 30th Jun '11 5:23:47 AM by Medinoc

"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."

We have no way to measure potential for abuse. We can only measure abuse that has happened. If a trope has had no abuse happen to it and it's been around for a long while then what is it's potential for abuse? Are you just going to go with your gut feeling that if you squint you could see how people use this wrong even if they don't?

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

^ No, you apply a good dose of common sense when looking at the name. You don't need to "measure" it, but if a group of people all say that a certain title could be misused, we can then check it's wicks.

Why? Look at that index. There are quite a few tropes on there, and it would take quite a bit of organising to check each one of them for unfitting examples/wicks, going through a TRS for those with decent numbers of both and then changing the wicks for the new names.

I am not advocating using "potential for abuse" as a reason to rename. Heck, I don't even go into TRS and I know that. Use "potential for abuse" as a filter so that we aren't wasting inordinate amounts of time on tropes which would struggle to be misused, and so that we can focus on tropes which are.

The common sense approach doesn't seem to work on titles from what I've seen in the TSR. It's far too subjective and it rarely seems to match up with reality. We have no formula for what works and what doesn't because there is no way to predict it. It seems to be almost at random and people will horribly misuse Exactly What It Says on the Tin.

edited 30th Jun '11 7:27:20 AM by shimaspawn

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -Philip K. Dick

I argue for keeping Stock Phrases, and keeping the current name of tropes named after stock phrases where:

1) The phrase neatly encapsulates the trope in a clear way

2) The phrase is used only for that trope in the majority of uses

I agree that many stock phrases that are a single trope don't go into explaining the trope, how and why its used. In those cases, the page just needs editing to add that explanation.

Other times there is a clear trope, but some of the examples of the phrase don't fit with the trope. In that case, I would either delete the example. The only problem would be if people kept re-adding, thinking they had just been overlooked instead of deleted because it didn't fit. Perhaps move examples that don't fit to a new section of the page, "Uses of the phrase in other contexts", or something, although that might encourage people to add more bad examples.

Finally, cases where there is no underlying trope, where all we have is examples of the same phrase being used with nothing that actually ties them together, then those pages I would delete. But my feeling is that these pages would be the minority.

I certainly don't feel that deleting these pages wholesale is the answer. The current quality of many pages may be low, but surely its better to improve them so they can stand as an example of how it should be done, to encourage more pages done properly, and only delete the pages that lack the potential to be a proper trope.

Quoting from Page 2; didn't see anyone else touch upon this as much as it should have soooo....

A trope is indeed a concept, thought, or technique, but nothing said here definitively explains why Stock Phrases can't represent concepts, thoughts, or techniques in and of themselves.

If you're meaning to argue that concepts, thoughts, and techniques can be conveyed through visual appearances, personal behaviors, and physical actions but cannot be conveyed through language itself, I don't buy that at all.

edited 30th Jun '11 10:39:08 AM by SeanMurrayI

Really? From what I see, it isn't a trash heap yet. I looks very organized in my opinion.

Also, a lot of people always oppose large changes like this. It's just the natural order of things.

I cannot articulate it well, but clichés and phrases are a bit different than regular tropes. They are far more concrete, they cannot be inverted, zigzagged, or subverted (except in the form of being ended differently, which is not interesting). That and there's nothing in "meaningful" stock phrases that differentiate them from really garbage ones like, say, "yeah, I know." It is a concept that's repeated in many works, but, what, we're going to have a page listing every work having "yeah, I know"?

edited 30th Jun '11 7:14:12 PM by Catalogue

The words above are to be read as if they are narrated by Morgan Freeman.

It's a good thing we don't have a page for that tropeless phrase, then.

That's more or less the reason for People Sit On Chairs — something is repeated in many works because it is merely coincidental, and doesn't communicate any meaning.

An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.

Good point. Disregard that last argument.

edited 30th Jun '11 8:08:29 PM by Catalogue

The words above are to be read as if they are narrated by Morgan Freeman.

I still think Japanese Stock Phrases is a useful page to have and even counts towards being a trope. A lot of those do count as tropes and have deeper meanings, beyond just being People Sitting On Chairs.

Many are cultural concepts and conventions which are reoccurring in fiction and can even be character defining if used in the right ways within the story. The same goes for a lot of western Stock phrases as well.

I say maybe have a page to acknowledge common stock phases with meanings but no examples, and for those with actual depth leave them as is. I'd also not cut Shout-Out stock phrases like Exactly as Planned .

edited 30th Jun '11 9:08:08 PM by Vyctorian

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I don't know, that seems like a real trope. It's not used very much, though—I didn't know about it until you linked to it. It's about a villain seemingly being defeated, and then it turns out to be nothing of the sort. This is almost always accompanied by some variation of Exactly as Planned, Just as Planned, or All According to Plan.

Regardless, individual tropes should be brought into TRS.

o.0 I never said it wasn't I said it should not be cut not should be cut.

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