Fixing titular mentions

And as often, the mods are awfully nuke-happy. Wouldn't it have been enough to close it?

edited 9th Oct '12 1:08:11 PM by Medinoc

If people take issue with it, the response shouldn't be "this is a cleanup thread, end of discussion." By definition, there is no "too late" for a discussion on a wiki, since everything on a wiki can always be changed. Mass corrections are the wiki's dirty work. No one wants to spend their time dealing with situations like this, but it happens. If the admin/mods are prepared to open things up and allow tropers to help fix the problem, they shouldn't be surprised that not everyone agrees with it. No matter how stupid the responses are, closing a thread doesn't make sense when the thread concerns a matter that needs to be dealt with by the wiki.

And if there can be no discussion, then why isn't there a ruling somewhere saying so in sensible terms? If you want the problem to be resolved, Fast Eddie should say "we have a problem with this word, it should be replaced with 'eponymous' when possible, or more preferably, reworded entirely so we don't just replace it with 96,000 uses of 'eponymous'."

I Googled both terms: "eponymous" ranks a about 9 million while the other term gets 152 million - a 16:1 ratio. Even if I restrict the search to just "eponymous character" (as a phrase), the Latin term still outweighs the Greek one, by about 4:1. Likewise, "eponymous role" is outweighed by the Latin synonym by about a 10:1 ratio.

I'm aware I'm not weighing search results by quality or context, but pretty much any noun you can combine it with shows a staggering difference in favor of the Latin term.

edited 10th Oct '12 11:39:50 AM by Stratadrake

Okay, that changes my opinion some. Trying to fight linguistic drift is never a good idea.

And now I had to wonder whether it would help if we made a page for "t i t u l a r", just like for egregious. It doesn't help much if only those few of us who discuss here know it.

It's not linguistic drift—or at least not recent linguistic drift. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first written use of "titular" in the sense of "relating to a title" (e.g. "titular character") occurred in 1656.

edited 11th Oct '12 11:31:30 AM by Nocturna

It may be only me, but I see a difference between "beastular" and "eponymous", in which the latter carries a shade of "shares his name with the breastle".

As an example, in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, I'd say Sirius Black is breastular, but not eponymous.

Brought to you by the Clbuttic Mistake

edited 11th Oct '12 11:40:25 AM by Medinoc

As a reminder, you don't have to say "breastular" or things like that. Bracket-equals markup allows you to type titular. This is handy for quick-fixes on the Wiki where hiding the "titular" destroys the meaning of the sentence, or ruins the direct quote or such.

Ah, so it's not as all-encompassing as the "tl;dr" filter?

@Nocturna: You're probably going to have to quote, not link, the OED entry as they won't let anyone actually view it without a registered account^note (not a large hurdle, true, but still a hurdle).

I pretty much have all the pertinent information there. (I was providing the link more so that if people wanted to double-check themselves, they could.) If you really think I should copy the whole defintion-and-quote block, I can, though it'll have to wait till Monday when I'm back on campus.

edited 11th Oct '12 8:57:28 PM by Nocturna

Interestingly enough, not only did the dictionary I just consulted agree that the sense in which titular has been used on the Wiki is a correct meaning, but it noted that eponymous means "of, relating to, or being the person for whom something is or is believed to be named". As in, something which is named after someone else (like, say, the Gutenberg Bible or any invention named after its inventor), not something which appears in the name of a work. A difference of semantics, perhaps, but a crucial one.

edited 14th Oct '12 8:43:48 AM by Ingonyama

All titles which include the character's name are named after the character—if the character had a different name, the title would be different. So it's a meaningless distinction to draw.

Heweittaminut...

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover uses "titular" without [==] without a problem.

EDIT: Nevar mind, when I edited the page to remove a pothole to Sarcasm mode, it disappeared.

edited 14th Oct '12 1:32:16 PM by TropeEater

^ When there's a code change, like the subject of this thread of removing strikethrough outside the forums, it won't affect existing pages until they've been edited. That's why the self-demonstrating BRIAN BLESSED!!!!! article is locked, so the enlarged text doesn't get knocked out.

edited 14th Oct '12 3:18:27 PM by Nohbody

@Nocturna: Er...no. Simply having a character's name in the title doesn't mean the work is named after them. The difference between eponymous and titular would be that an eponymous character is one the work is about or who lends a series its name (say, for example, Nancy Drew) while a titular character would be one which appears in the name of a work and is in some way crucial to its plot (like the Sword of Shannara). It is possible for a title character/object to be both or to contain both (for example, any children's mystery series where the detectives are part of the overarching title—they would be eponymous, the thing they're looking for, if it appears in the title, is titular) but it doesn't have to be.

edited 19th Oct '12 1:52:48 PM by Ingonyama

So, not only a random word got the Orwell treatment, it can be brought in by something as simple as equation marks and brackets. I wonder if we're all dancing on the edge of a ban here.

An eponymous character is not a character "a work is about". An eponymous character is a character who has contributed their name to the title.

This little contretemps has made its way to Language Log, and a bunch of Ph Ds in Linguistics are now making fun of Fast Eddie.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4293

eta: for anyone tempted to comment over there, I should mention that Language Log has very strict posting guidelines, not dissimilar to the rules on OT discussions here.

edited 4th Nov '12 1:17:12 PM by Xtifr

And we're supposed to care... why?

If Something Awful's opinion (which I'm betting gets a lot more "coverage" than a discussion site for linguists) is irrelevant, other than being more erudite and having a few extra letters tacked onto the end of their name what makes their opinion more relevant to this site?

Funny how they have the whole thing mis-characterized. Cute, how they assume that I have no access to a dictionary. You would expect more from academics.

Neither titular or eponymous add anything of value for our articles. They are stilted terms intended to draw attention to the writer's vocabulary, more than anything else. The character can always be called by name. The example paragraphs always name the work involved. Those few people who cannot resolve a reference to the character bearing the same name as the work are beyond our help.

Titular is being filtered out to draw attention to our aim of not wanting to be stilted and academic in tone.

edited 4th Nov '12 8:04:59 PM by FastEddie

Right, so all the common mass media that regularly use the word titular are hopelessly stilted? I think that's a pretty hard argument to sustain.

You obviously didn't read very carefully, because they never said that you hadn't read a dictionary. They thought that was a likely hypothesis, based on the available evidence, but when I pointed out that you'd claimed you had, they made short shrift of my (admittedly half-hearted) defense. And it is a poor defense. I can't defend your position, Eddie, try as I might.

Our quotes are mangled, our examples have been rendered incomprehensible, and the easiest fix is always to simply use markup to make titular reappear. If your goal was to make the wiki less stilted, I have a hard time thinking of a worse approach you could have taken.

I'm also mildly insulted at the suggestion that my natural vocabulary stems from some sort of desire to impress. Sorry, I was raised by writers, and this is just the way I speak. Words like titular are part of my normal, everyday vocabulary, because I was raised in a house where the walls were lined with books and no TV, and we had some of the Bay Area's best SF writers as regular visitors. If my vocabulary is too fancy for TV Tropes, tell me now, and I'll go away, but I don't think I'm capable of dumbing myself down to the level you seem to desire.

We look for a breezy style that connects with the reader. That's the art part.

The filtering brings action. The stuff that it breaks gets fixed. Getting our mob to change its ways doesn't happen without a occasional push.

The problem is that repeating someone's name looks clumsy, rather than "a breezy style that connects to the reader". That's why we use "titular" or "eponymous" in the first place.

edited 4th Nov '12 10:18:41 PM by Medinoc

No, it doesn't. Titular and eponymous looks snotty and denigrate the reader. They can't figure out the thing is named for the character? Puh-leese.

edited 4th Nov '12 10:21:12 PM by FastEddie