 | Disambiguation | |||
| ||||
The minced oath edit
Two entries were unacceptable:
- Fug, a minced oath used by Norman Mailer in The Naked and the Dead
- The Fugs, a band who took their name from Mailer's minced oath
The first had two blue links, the first of which makes no mention of Fug and is thus the obvious candidate to go: links in Dab entries may not be here to elucidate the terminology, but only bcz they cover topics that users might have intended to find by typing the Dab page's title. You might do a search for "fug", or "darn", if you can't remember the term "minced oath" but wanted a term with that meaning, but if you do, you're too clueless to deserve help from a Dab page in pursuing your goal. (Such users will be much better served by a Google search, or looking in Wikt at prettier names for taboo words they can think of, which may mention "m.o." in a space of 3 to 6 words instead of 4 lines, and more importantly, without our cluttering the Dab page to the detriment of users who need a Dab page.) It's fairly reasonable that NM's usage of the term is discussed (probably the first instance of going that far in serious popular lit, and IIRC a mechanism that was praised as making clear a dimension of the stress of war that e.g. All Quiet on the Western Front had failed to achieve in the Great War.
As to the second, "Fug" would only be entered by a desperate person who has encountered a reference to the band (quite probably bcz they don't understand the difference between a 'pedia & a dict). Helping them is not out of the question, but it must not interfere with helping the more likely users of the page, and thus lie, separated by a final heading, at the end of the Dab page.
I'm not sure the two entries aren't also too thoro to conform to the terseness of good dab entries, but that's less important (tho i may give it some thot after i'm done w/ this talk entry).
--Jerzy•t 03:07, 30 April 2015 (UTC)