Talk:dumb as a bag of hammers

The following information passed a request for deletion.

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.

---

dumb as a bag of hammers

SOP. Any seeming nonSOPness is exaggeration rather than what we call idiomaticity.​—msh210℠ (talk) 21:54, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

I concur.  Delete. ~ Röbin Liönheart (talk) 09:25, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

WikiTiki89's comparison to dead as a doornail persuaded me to change my mind. ~ Röbin Liönheart (talk) 16:20, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Keep. I don't think a bag of hammers particularly implies stupidity, yet this has become a fixed phrase in English somehow. Equinox ◑ 12:30, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

It's of a pair with dumb as a box of rocks, this time built on a different vowel. I guess "dumb as a bag of rags" wouldn't have worked semantically, so another word with the same vowel was substituted. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:37, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

• Keep. Not interchangeable with, e.g., dumb as a bag of wrenches or dumb as a bag of mallets. bd2412 T 14:23, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

• Keep since it's a fixed phrase. Of course you could say "dumb as a bag of wrenches", "dumb as pile of potato pancakes", or "dumb as a whatever", but those are not fixed phrases. --WikiTiki89 14:51, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Keep per Equinox. The ideal solution would be if we had an accepted way of representing the class of idiomatic constructions of which this is one of the more common representatives. For example, we could have an entry like [[dumb as an X of Ys]] which was reached by redirects and by searches. The translations could contain any somewhat similar constructions in other languages or "see" references. An alternative would be to have several of these as unlinked derived terms at [[dumb]], though {{rel-top}} would serve to confuse casual users when they arrived at the entry. DCDuring TALK 14:54, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Other representatives of the class of idiomatic similes include bucket of (wet) hair, glass of water, dish of kraut, bucket/bag/sack/box of nails/doorknobs/used-up spark plugs/cookies/shredded wheat/dirt/bras DCDuring TALK 15:17, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Does it even have to be "dumb as an X of Y"? "X of Y" is just a special case of a noun phrase. You can be dumb as any noun phrase, regardless of whether there's an "of". --WikiTiki89 15:42, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

I understand the nomination though, it's in the form as dumb as X where no matter what the 'X' part is it means 'very dumb'. So the meaning is predictable. I also understand the keep votes. Perhaps there's enough reasonable doubt here to keep it, but I'm not sure either way. Mglovesfun (talk) 15:54, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

"dumb as X" is a generalization logically, but certainly not historically, for "dumb as an X of Ys". But "X as Y" is simply the generic form for all similes ("crazy/pretty/drunk/horny/smart/crafty/sharp/fat/thin/cold/hot as (an) X"), which is much more easily dismissed as non-lexical, as part of the grammar of English. I wouldn't think we would want any of them, except possibly as redirects to either the adjective section for "X" or a separate simile page for all "X"-adjective similes. "dumb as an X of Ys" is not open to a large range of substitutes for dumb and has a particular structure, but allows several Xs and a fairly large number of Ys, though prosodic and phonetic factors favor certain combinations. DCDuring TALK 17:48, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

To be honest, I see nothing special historically or logically or anythingelsically about "dumb as an X of Ys". The reason I voted to keep is not because of the structure, but because the commonness of this particular case makes it idiomatic. dead as a doornail is just as idiomatic and it has no "X of Ys" structure at all. --WikiTiki89 17:55, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

You do recognize that it is clearly not a set phrase and that substantial variation is possible over both nouns in the expression, right? Even if one defines set phrase as not always perfectly invariant, ie as one that has exactly the same form (except for inflection) just, say, 75%, 67%, 60%, or even 50, 40%, 33% of the time, this is still not a set phrase. If we depend on mere attestable restrictions on pairings of nouns in the two slots after dumb, then there are probably half a dozen or more of these to be found and more are being created in speech every day. DCDuring TALK 17:43, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Do box of rocks and bag of hammers have a special position among all the candidate pairings? Yes. Both of them are Usenet-attestable used as intensifiers of dumb, ie, bag-of-hammers dumb and box-of-rocks dumb. By the arguments being made these would seem also to be includable. DCDuring TALK 17:43, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

A lot of things are attestable. I am saying that "dumb as a bag of hammers" is idiomatic if it is overwhelmingly more common than similar phrases, not just because it is merely attestable. --WikiTiki89 17:47, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

But it is not "overwhelmingly more common" than similar phrases.

Interestingly bag of hammers and bags of hammers are both readily attestable outside of the expression. They are used metaphorically to refer to stupid people. Grammatically they can be the subject of sentences and do not depend on prior use in the same discussion or work.

If we are to maintain a high standard of completeness with our current approach to "idiomaticity", we need to memorialize each attestable variation in this evolution with entries for each attestable instance of the construction. We need at least "(as) dumb as a/two/... box(es) of rocks" (N entries), "dumber than a/two/... box/boxes of rocks" (M entries), "box(es) of rocks" (2 entries), in addition to those involving "bags of hammers", "buckets of hair", etc.

An alternative of approach of including only redirect entries seems much better, but having as target only one, two, three or ten examples of the construction still misses the productivity of the construction. That is why I am arguing for a different kind of main entry for relatively open-ended constructions like this. DCDuring TALK 18:18, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

I didn't mean similar versions of the same phrase, I meant similar phrases (like "bag of mallets"). Clearly "bags of hammers" is just a less common variant of "bag of hammers", not a different phrase. --WikiTiki89 18:24, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

For that kind of argument to work wouldn't you want to be able to show it with "hammer" fixed and the container word varying too? Why is the tool function even salient, given that there is no special connection between the toolishness of hammer and its semantic role in the expression?

At bgc "dumb as a bag of hammers" outnumbers other "bag of" nouns 16:8 on a first-results-page count (other 6 weren't visible). Is that "overwhelming"?

Are you arguing that any such quantitative selectional restriction makes something an includable set phrase? That would argue for including at least one phrase for hair (with bucket), rocks (with box), but not hair because attestable usage of the container-word is more evenly distributed (among bag (5), box (4), bucket and sack (2), and barrel (1). Or would you combine bag and sack on grounds of semantic equivalence making a total of 7, overwhelmingly more the 6 for the others? DCDuring TALK 19:47, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

I'm talking about comparing the occurrence of "dumb as a bag of hammers" with the occurrences of all other "dumb as X" phrases. --WikiTiki89 19:52, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

But is NOT by itself overwhelmingly more common than the others, not being even the majority of cases, as dumb as a box of rocks is probably more common or about as common. If you are saying that the representatives we have should in combination be overwhelmingly more common than the excluded ones, we can almost always add more representatives until that is true. DCDuring TALK 21:23, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

• Keep either as a non-SOP, or as a simile outside of CFI. This is what I wrote at Talk:flat as a pancake: Similes are often uninteresting for the decoding direction ("What does 'flat as a pancake' mean?"), but are key for encoding direction ("How do I say 'very flat' using a simile?") and for translation ("How do I render 'flat as a pancake' using a Spanish simile?"). --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:46, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

  Similes might be a good place to test out the general "idiomatic construction" approach. They are relatively well defined, I think, and have arguments in support of them that are in addition to the "semi-open idiomatic construction" arguments. I think the main simile page, say, [[flat as a pancake]], should contain many of the less common, but attestable similes ("flat as a board") and the historical ones ("flat as a flounder") and be the target of many redirects, for purposes of economizing on translations, entry effort, and user time and effort. The similes are each of restricted applicability, too, which would require more explanations. (In the US, topography is "as flat as Kansas", not "as flat as a pancake" nor "as flat as a board".) We do have to work out ways of distinguishing less common similes such as those of other senses of flat and cross-sense similes "The proposal fell as flat as yesterday's beer." DCDuring TALK 21:17, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

• Kept --ElisaVan (talk) 10:12, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

  Striking the heading. --Dan Polansky (talk) 22:04, 13 December 2013 (UTC)