Talk:warp

Teleport

If I warp from level 1-2 to 4-1 in Mario, which definition of this word am I using? –dMoberg 20:19, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Verb 7, which is the intransitive of Verb 2. —Stephen 13:48, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Actually I don't think any of our senses covers this. I'll add one. Equinox ◑ 09:55, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Dialectal and other rare senses

The English Dialect Dictionary has several dialectal noun senses which I haven't found citations of; besides the two present in the entry (now RFVed), it has:

1. a piece of land between two furrows, consisting of ridges; a ridge; a flat, wide bed of ploughed land
2. (obsolete) the stream of salt water which runs from the bring-pots; salt warp

   google books:"salt warp" seems to be a type of soil or something deposited in or on soil

3. a smart stroke or blow
4. a stroke of the oar in rowing

   (but this seems to only be Scots, becuase its example is "I canna rowe wi' sikkan warps")

5. a variety of potato

   (again Scots: "what mack o' putates hev ye?" "ah've some warps")

It also has these verb senses:

1. to lace together the ends of a 'sean-net' : "boats are engaged in warping the ends together"
2. (obsolete) to make an embankment : "An attempt has been ... made ... to recover land from the sea by warping; this is done by driving piles of wood into the beach, interwoven with branches of trees or any sort of bramble, to retain the mud on the ebbng of the tide." Agric. Surv. 230 (Jam.)
3. to open
4. to lay eggs : "Stone the ducks home to warp". / "How many eggs has she warped?"
5. (obsolete) to make a bleating sound. "o'ver the rank scented fen the bleetur was warping"
6. with 'up': to plough land in 'warps'

Dictionary.com has an intransitive verb sense, used of earth's crust, "to bend slightly, to a degree that no fold or fault results". Century adds a transitive sense, marked as rare, "to change", citing Shakespeare's "though thou the waters warp". The 1876 Shakespeare's Comedy of As You Like it, page 134, has a sort of mini-dictionary: *: Warp—contract and shrivel (here by freezing; in III, iii, 75, by drought). In the Thesaurus Linguarum of George Hicken, D.D., the great Anglo-Saxon scholar, 1642-1715, the Saxon proverb 'Winter shall warp water' is quoted, showing that the meaning of this word here is 'weave into a firm texture.' Propertius uses the same simile: 'Africus, in glaciem frigore nectit aquas.'—Elegies, IV, iii. (The south-west wind warps the waters into ice by its chilness.)

Compare:

• 1785, The Muse's Pocket Companion: A Collection of Poems, page 191:

  Whether where equinoctial fervours glow, / Or winter warps the polar world in snow, / Still let thy voice prevailing over time, […]

This, though poetic, could be another example of the "change" sense, or could be "distort":

• 1970, Martha Fritz, Tides, page 9:

  […] we had to lean far to see our field become what we had come for; the luscious colors of a finger painting. I'd forgotten how wind warps the russets after dark.

- -sche (discuss) 23:06, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

A mention-y citation of the "throw" sense:

• 1920, C. M. Drennan, Cockney Engels en Kombuis Hollands, page 10:

  At one time we used to “warp” stones, then we fancied the Scandinavian “cast,” which in its turn became “throw,” which may be in the near future “chuck.” In Canada the boys “pelt rocks,” and in Ireland they “fire” them.

- -sche (discuss) 04:02, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

This is possibly a citation of "distort" rather than "of wind: move", given that it's discussing a film prop:

"Now we had to make sure we were getting our foreground and background wind effect, but that no current ever hit the front of the building when it started to fall, because if the wind warps her, she's not going to fall where we want her[.]"

- -sche (discuss) 04:06, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

The snow one is just a typo. Winter wraps the polar world in snow. Equinox ◑ 04:49, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Ah, you're right. - -sche (discuss) 05:05, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Tea Room discussion of fish sense

See Wiktionary:Tea room/2016/February#warp.2C_cast.

RFV discussion: February–April 2016

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warp

RFV of four senses:

noun

1. (dialectal) The young of an animal when brought forth prematurely; a cast lamb, kid, calf, or foal.

verb

1. (obsolete, rare, intransitive) To weave.
2. (transitive, intransitive, dialectal, of a door) To throw open; to open wide.
3. (transitive, obsolete outside dialects) To utter, give utterance to.

- -sche (discuss) 05:29, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

I tried to attest the noun sense, only found uses for what seemed to be past participles of the corresponding verb sense. DCDuring TALK 14:04, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

Try While he doth mischief warp. for "to weave" Nevermind, this is already at sense 8. Some dictionaries have "weave" and "fabricate" in the same sense, where we show them separately (and curiously "weave" is intransitive. Should be make "weave" transitive and combine 7 & 8, do you think ? Leasnam (talk) 18:55, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

Incorporating sense 7 into sense 8 as something like "to fabricate or weave (a plot or scheme)" would be fine. I RFVed it because it doesn't seem to ever mean "weave" in a literal, cloth-related sense when used intransitively, even though "weave" can be used that way, and even though some dictionaries imply that "warp" can be used that way. For example, Century has "II. intrans. [...] 5. to weave; hence, to plot", where the semicolon and "hence" implies they thought "warp" sometimes meant just "weave" (intransitively) and didn't always entail "plot". Curiously, their usex — "warping profit" — seems transitive (and the "plot" sense does seem to be, as we label it, ambitransitive). Btw, the English Dialect Dictionary lists several more senses of warp which I couldn't find any attestation for; I listed them on the talk page, if you happen to know of citations of any of them. - -sche (discuss) 21:09, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

Verb sense 18, 3 above, is attested in in the OED in Middle English in various spellings and, barely, in EME in inflected forms warpit and warpis. DCDuring TALK 23:50, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

Similarly for verb sense 2 above.

I could not find anything in the OED that corresponded to verb sense 1 above. DCDuring TALK 23:50, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

• The OED has a large number of other definitions which, were they in our entry, especially in historical order or in a sense/subsense structure, would completely obscure the senses in current use. Even combining some of their barely distinguishable definitions would hardly help. Perhaps hiding (or omitting) all EME-only definitions would help. The sense development from "throw, cast", through "weave", to "twist" and "distort, bias" is probably fascinating as an object of study in the comparative historical semantics of Germanic languages, but in this case IMO might deter a language-learning user from ever coming to Wiktionary again.

Maybe we should select certain definitions in such entries for highlighting or exclusive or prominent display for default users and display full entries only to those who select an option to do so. DCDuring TALK 00:07, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

I agree with the concern that someone unfamiliar with the word's common uses might be confused by the number of definitions if kept in generally historical order. But I disagree with the idea that keeping them in rough order is only of interest for obscure semantic study. The reason why OED and many other dictionaries tend to give definitions in historical order rather than frequency of use (often difficult to prove) is because the subtle meaning of a word in most or all of its uses is often derived from or based on those earlier uses, and knowing them or being able to peruse them helps a general understanding of the word's meaning. Most words, of course, don't have nearly as many meanings as this one, so readers aren't faced with the same level of difficulty sorting between inapplicable definitions and the one that fits the context in which they found it used.

That said, many of the 18 current definitions (three of which are RFV'ed) could be grouped or combined to make the senses easier to understand. For instance, senses 1 and 2 are simply transitive and intransitive versions of the same sense, as are senses 3 and 4; and all of them are very closely related. Senses 7 and 8 seem to be literal and metaphorical uses of the same sense, and seem related to senses 5 and 6; senses 10 and 11 are also transitive and intransitive versions of the same sense. The odd men out, largely ungroupable, are senses 9 and 12–18, which really shouldn't move much, except perhaps for moving sense 9 after the current sense 11.

I add that the number of notes preceding each definition looks quite distracting. Is it really helpful to describe the same sense as both rare and obsolete? Surely if the term is obsolete, it would rarely be encountered. Why does the verb's transitive or intransitive nature precede other descriptions in every sense except sense 7? Figuratively doesn't make sense in sense 8, unless plots are normally woven from real fabric. I would definitely combine 7 and 8: "to weave, fabricate; metaphorically, to plot" or something along those lines. P Aculeius (talk) 14:06, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

I take (rare,obsolete) to mean that the term is obsolete and that, even when it was not obsolete, it was rare. The grammatical notes about countability and transitivity have been thought to be helpful in differentiating senses. I thought that all of weave, fabricate, and plot were metaphorical or figurative senses of the verbs used. I don't think that literal and metaphorical senses should be grouped. We might end up with very short lists of definitions for a term like head, as virtually all but one of the senses are figurative or metaphorical. What we see in the "weave, fabricate, plot" definition is an example of why a polysemic term can be confusing in a definition. We sometimes have list-of-synonyms definitions, usually copying Webster 1913. They can be among our least comprehensible definitions. DCDuring TALK 14:53, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

I've combined the "intransitive: weave" and "plot" senses in the manner Leasnam and I discussed, which makes clear (IMO) that it doesn't refer to literal weaving of cloth. Yes, "obsolete, rare" indicates that the sense was rare even when it wasn't obsolete; I've reordered it to "rare, obsolete". I've subsensed some of the senses; if the RFVed senses fail, there'll be only 9 noun and 9 verb senses, plus subsenses. - -sche (discuss) 16:11, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

It looks much better. Perhaps we should have at least one usage example for each of the current definitions and none for the obsolete, rare, or specialized senses to give more visual weight to the current definitions.

By comparison, for the verb OED has 53 definitions (!!!), including subsenses, in 30 senses. 29 definitions don't have three citations from 1470 or later, some not even any citations in Middle English. That would give them 24, where we would have 17 after the expected RfV failures. We haven't yet been excessively inclusive. DCDuring TALK 17:27, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

RFV-failed. - -sche (discuss) 04:08, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

RFD discussion: February 2016

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for deletion (permalink).

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warp (verb)

Sense 11 seems the same as sense 8. Are they distinct, or should we delete one (or merge them)? Andrew Sheedy (talk) 05:27, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

The real problem with sense 8 is that its quotes show it to be just sense 7, takien figuratively. The definition for sense 8 is definitely wrong for the quotes, and probably just wrong, period. Chuck Entz (talk) 06:27, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

RFV? With 19 senses there's a lot of room for redundancy or just plain wrongness. Renard Migrant (talk) 13:11, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

All the cites at sense 8 would seem to me to belong to sense 11 with is 8's figurative counterpart. I don't think we have any cites for the literal, physical sense at 8 from which 11 is most likely derived. DCDuring TALK 14:26, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Many of the senses including 8 are taken, word-for-word, from Century 1911. I think that 8 and 11 can be combined under a definition that built more closely on the physical "twist" senses of warp.

Move to rfc. This seems like a cleanup job to me. There are several uncited, obscure senses with may not prove attestable by our standards, but wording could stand to be improved first. What are "obsolete outside dialects"? Is that supposed to mean "obsolete except in dialects"? To me it is much too distracting because of the alteernative reading. DCDuring TALK 14:37, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

I'll give the entry the treatment I describe at User talk:-sche/basic English; I should be finished in a few hours. :) I've already spotted one intransitive nautical sense, besides the one we do have, which we're missing (if it's attested — I'll be checking). - -sche (discuss) 20:42, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Done. See WT:RFV#warp for the only senses I couldn't find citations of. - -sche (discuss) 05:30, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

I was going to list it in RFV, but I decided to put it here because I figured we were dealing with a redundant, badly worded sense, rather than an actually distinct one. I'm not so sure now, though. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 03:50, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

IMO this has been resolved by rewriting the entry. - -sche (discuss) 18:38, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

Agreed, and thank you for that. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 20:50, 19 February 2016 (UTC)