Talk:cost a pretty penny

This seems redundant to pretty penny, which is also used e.g. with "worth". Equinox ◑ 15:17, 24 September 2016 (UTC)

RFD discussion: April 2017–May 2018

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

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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cost a pretty penny

SoP, pretty penny, can also "make", "earn", etc. Equinox ◑ 20:46, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

• Um, that would include the translations, ones that don't appear at pretty penny. I like the Spanish one, cost a testicle and a half. DonnanZ (talk) 22:05, 24 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Those aren't direct translations for "cost a pretty penny" but general idiomatic equivalents of "cost a large amount". bd2412 T 22:49, 24 April 2017 (UTC)
    • Not that I disagree with your basic point, but translations are "general idiomatic equivalents". Ƿidsiþ 06:43, 26 April 2017 (UTC)
      • A synonym is cost an arm and a leg, which went through the indignity of an RFD in 2009, and got redirected to arm and a leg. An arm and a leg are two different things, and the idiom only makes sense in full. We don't need a repeat of that disaster. DonnanZ (talk) 09:36, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

In other words, keep this entry in its present form. DonnanZ (talk) 08:50, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

• Redirect to pretty penny. DCDuring (talk) 13:27, 26 April 2017 (UTC)
  • See diff DonnanZ (talk) 13:44, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

    @Donnanz: So? DCDuring (talk) 03:10, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

• Redirect or keep. The definition line could be changed to "To be [[expensive]]; to cost a [[pretty penny]]". The entry is in http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/cost+a+pretty+penny, where it seems to have two entries, one marked as "Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. © 2015 Farlex, Inc, all rights reserved", another one marked as "McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs. © 2002 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc." The full phrase is in Macmillan[1], but most OneLook dictionaries only seem to have "pretty penny": “a pretty penny”, in OneLook Dictionary Search. (Merriam-Webster, Oxford Dictionaries, Collins, Dictionary.com), “cost a pretty penny”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.. I seem to like these longer phrase entries with a verb; they seem more natural to me (like cost an arm and a leg). However, I'll grant there is some force in the argument for deletion, including there being other verbs used: cost a pretty penny, pay a pretty penny, make a pretty penny, earn a pretty penny at the Google Books Ngram Viewer.. --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:08, 19 August 2017 (UTC)

  Switching to "keep" per DonnanZ: The entry makes a better translation hub "as is", e.g. for Spanish: costar un ojo de la cara (cost an eye of the face) and Russian: влететь в копеечку (fly into a copeck), ударить по карману (strike the pocket). Once you reduce the entry to "pretty penny", you lose the ability to map the associated verbs as well, which, for Russian, are "fly" and "strike"; in fact, you cannot map "pretty penny" to "pocket" at all. Redirection is still better than deletion, but I want the entry to be kept. --Dan Polansky (talk) 10:16, 10 February 2018 (UTC)

• Redirect to pretty penny. The reader won't be shocked to land there, and will immediately figure out what the entire idiom means. Might as well do the same with make a pretty penny and earn a pretty penny. bd2412 T 02:57, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

Redirected and put quotes there too --Otra cuenta105 (talk) 14:50, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

• Unstriken: let this be closed by someone who is not Wonderfool. Furthermore, it is not clear that "redirect" is the winning option. --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:30, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

Our general practice, where the idiomatic part is "pretty penny" and several verbs can be used with it, would see us redirect this. I'm sympathetic to the argument that many translations include verbs ... but they seem to be verbs meaning "cost" and the nouns seem to be used with other verbs in those languages, too; for example, "ein hübsches Sümmchen verdienen" (make a pretty penny) exists in German, not just "ein hübsches Sümmchen kosten". If we redirect this and there are languages that only have idiomatic constructions for some of the collocations, like if something could only coûter bonbon and you couldn't also gagner bonbon (which, however, it seems you can?), then we should give those translations (e.g. coûter bonbon, with the verb) in the translations table at [[pretty penny]] with a {{q|"cost a..."}} translating the verb.
I say redirect, for consistency, as long as we're just talking about this entry. But we should probably rethink our overall approach to idioms, because we also have issues with idioms that are mostly negative but sometimes positive and therefore lemmatized under the positive form, but not necessarily any more guaraneteed than this entry is to be translatable into other languages in that form. We should perhaps begin to allow more forms of idioms (e.g. noun-only like pretty penny and verb-including like cost a pretty penny, positive like say boo to a goose and negative like wouldn't say boo to a goose) to have prominently cross-linked entries and translations tables... - -sche (discuss) 22:16, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

If there is no further discussion on this, I intend to re-close it as redirected. bd2412 T 17:55, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

Redirected. It has been a solid three weeks. bd2412 T 23:22, 9 May 2018 (UTC)