Aren't they all? New Crowner 10/17/11: Incredibly Lame Pun

How about Puns a la Xanth?

Geek For the Win

What in the world is that supposed to mean?

Piers Anthony's Xanth is known for its love of puns and wordplay. But for this context it is a Bad Trope Namer.

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

Who says it can't be both a trope and something to pothole to? (Sarcasm Mode and Schmuck Bait come to mind.)

But yeah, I don't think it's particularly harmful to redefine the trope to fit how it's most often used in this case.

"The Daily Show has to be right 100% of the time; FOX News only has to be right once." - Jon Stewart

Bump...

"The Daily Show has to be right 100% of the time; FOX News only has to be right once." - Jon Stewart

I'm wondering when we'll get rid of the egregious pun pot/sinkholing. Can't be far off in the future. The general direction is going towards removing links to tropes when they refer to the trope being used in article/example descriptions and not referring to tropes in works.

Flat "What" went that way. Or Is It went that way. If You Know What I Mean went that way.

Incredibly Lame Pun, or whatever its next incarnation, is going to go too.

If it is decided to keep ILP as the pothole magnet, the answer is probably "never."

Thing is, while the option for switching to Pun Intended is 17 points in the green, the ratio is at 1.68 to 1. Is the 2:1 thing just a guideline or a strict rule for this kind of thing, and what do we do if we get no consensus here?

EDITED IN: And even if we decide not to keep ILP as a pothole magnet, how do we go about fixing the preconception, in many tropers minds', that it is one?

edited 29th Dec '11 6:18:11 AM by HiddenFacedMatt

"The Daily Show has to be right 100% of the time; FOX News only has to be right once." - Jon Stewart

I'm pretty sure that, unless we get admin fiat to the contrary on a particular issue, it's a strict rule.

I'm going to see if I can get the crowner called, as it's been stable for a while.

I think the next thing we need to do is discuss whether we're even going to keep a pothole for puns. (If we do, it would be ILP.) We never really did discuss that as an actionable point.

My reservations about removing a pothole for puns is that I think it's something that's going to be even harder than the other sinkholes to get people to stop using, because pointing out puns is something people tend to do in regular conversation/casual writing. Getting people to stop would take a huge effort: We'd have to change the message on the ILP page (easy). Not only would we have to go through almost 7000 wicks now, we would also have to keep going through the wicks for quite a while to catch and remove new potholes (time-consuming). We'd have to PM people who added them recently (not hard, but somewhat tedious). We'd need to clean the wicks for A Worldwide Punomenon and Just For Pun and also keep a watch on those pages, PMing tropers as necessary (see above). And we'd have to keep this up indefinitely. And that still wouldn't preclude a new pun pothole springing up, which we would then need to take care of.

Now, I realize that "too much work" in and of itself is not a good argument against something. And I don't mind (and even rather like) the idea of removing the generally unnecessary potholes from troper-made puns. But there comes a point at which I have to ask: is the net benefit to the wiki really enough to justify the amount of work it would take? The pun potholes aren't really hurting anything. They are, in my experience, almost always actually puns, and thus are actually pointing at what the trope itself is (unlike understatement, which was often used to emphasize things that weren't understatements, like "he was the strongest man, ever"; or If You Know What I Mean (IfYouKnowWhatIMean), which was generally used to lampshade tropers' double entendres, rather than for lampshaded double entendres).

edited 30th Dec '11 4:26:22 AM by Nocturna

Calling crowner.

I've realized that even if we continue to allow pun potholes, we'll need to make a decision about which page should be potholed to, and clean the others. I've currently seen puns potholed to Incredibly Lame Pun, A Worldwide Punomenon, and Just For Pun.

In favour of ending ILP's pothole magnet status and transferring that to Pun Intended?

That's what the current crowner says; voting up is for voting that the pothole magnet will be Pun Intended instead of ILP (or any others) from now on.

That will be a lot of links to look through, though. o.o

edited 30th Dec '11 10:46:27 AM by HiddenFacedMatt

"The Daily Show has to be right 100% of the time; FOX News only has to be right once." - Jon Stewart

The crowner ended with no consensus to change. Incredibly Lame Pun is the pothole magnet, as it was before.

Got it.

So if it's official, now, that ILP is the pothole magnet, can we link to this for future reference when people try to remove potholes to it?

"The Daily Show has to be right 100% of the time; FOX News only has to be right once." - Jon Stewart

Not sure. I think we should start voting on restoring the old definition now.

edited 30th Dec '11 2:11:34 PM by MyTimingIsOff

Why would we want to restore the old definition? The current definition is a legitimate trope.

Or are you suggesting that we vote on moving the current definition to a different name and leaving ILP purely as a pothole magnent?

Yes. That's what I meant. Trope Transplant the trope somewhere else and leave ILP as the magnet. It was already proposed earlier in this thread.

edited 30th Dec '11 2:40:35 PM by MyTimingIsOff

For anyone who's interested, I started a thread to figure out what to do with A Worldwide Punomenon, which is a related issue.

They're to what the trope was initially, however the current trope is about reactions to puns. Leading option in the crowner says to define Incredibly Lame Pun as in-universe only.

Except that's not happening. We didn't get the two-to-one consensus necessary to enact a change.

The page currently defines it as in-universe, though.

Well, if we can move the trope to a different page and redefine ILP as "pothole puns here" that won't be a problem anymore.

Why do puns need to be potholed? If they're funny that just makes them not so funny, and if they're actually lame then the pothole makes them lamer. I don't understand why everyone wants to pothole things all the time.

"Did anybody invent this stuff on purpose?" - Phillip Marlowe on tequila, Finger Man by Raymond Chandler.

I completely agree. Potholing a pun is essentially showing that whoever made the pothole wasn't confident that the reader would get the joke.

Crowner failed, guys. Is there any reason to keep this thread open, given that there was no consensus to change?

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

I'm pretty sure we were going to vote on moving the trope to a different page and restoring ILP's old definition so that the potholes actually match.