Talk:Payroll vote

Constitutional Point

The British constitution does NOT require that ministers be members of the House of Lord's, it is just a commonly observed convention. Alec Douglas-Home was not a member of either for a period, while he was Prime Minister seeking election to the House of Commons. When Parliament is dissolved, there are NO MPs at all, yet ministerial office resumes and those MPs who were ministers but did not seek or achieve re-election remain in office as ministers until the Prime Minister appoints a replacement even though they are not members of either house. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hypnoticmonkey (talk • contribs) 14:48, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

   Omigosh, "House of Lord's"? Now, i grant you, talk pages are for discussion toward improving each one's corresponding non-talk page, but if you mention here beer and benzidrine, I'm not likely to refrain from saying "Hey, don't do stupid shit!" By the same token, don't ever, ever, write "House of Lord's". The rules for punctuating plural possessive (in English, at least) are confusing enuf that no one should ever add to the confusion by sticking in an apostrophe in an instance where the lords are possessing nothing. "House of Lords" parallels, grammatically, "our hats", i.e. the hats of you and me. These are lords belonging to a house, distinguished from other houses by its proper name, "House of Lords", and the lords in question belong to the house (more in the senses of composing it, being its members or members in it, than of slavishly construing "belonging to" as "being owned by". Or, from another angle, my having two hats wouldn't make "my hats' " meaningful except as a joke.
--Jerzy•t 13:44 &18:35, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

   OK, "both my hats' brims" is not a joke. But does involve relations of (grammatical) possession drastically different from those in our colleague's talk contribution.
--Jerzy•t 18:35, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

Not an article whose topic is a term

   With few enuf exceptions that when you see them, you're likely to stop and take note (an exercise that will do you more good than anything i care to write about the exercise) our policy is to write primarily about things, and not about their names. (Yes, a name is a thing, but the rarity of the exceptions reflects most other things are more interesting, and valuable for study, than their corresponding names.) In this case, the thing that "payroll vote" is a name for is so much more in our wheelhouse than its name that there's no reason to (and many reasons not to) do more than mention the name without labeling it as a name.
--Jerzy•t 14:25, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

   If i'd been at the top of my game a few minutes ago, I'd have said "encyclopedia-worthy" instead of "interesting".
--Jerzy•t 14:44, 29 June 2016 (UTC)