Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 November 22

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November 22

The Next Big Thing

So, people at the start of their careers are often called this by those promoting them. But when, and if, they do become successful, nobody ever refers to them as "the current big thing" or "the latest big thing" or "the incumbent big thing", or anything else like that. They're called entertainers, singers, actors, whatever - never "big things".

Why do they cease to be "big things" once they actually become, er, big things? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 00:32, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Because we were into them before anyone else ever heard about them.--Jayron32 01:33, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

The phrases "current big thing" and "latest big thing" both get a number of Google hits, some of them linking to speculations about how those concepts differ from the "next big thing" concept. Deor (talk) 11:48, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Really? It never occurred to me to check that. So my premise was wrong. Again. Thanks. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:06, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Resolved

Thorn with a little e on top

This one

Is this anywhere in Unicode, or is it compositable? If not can we do thorn with a dot over it? A later version would be acceptable, even preferable.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 02:09, 22 November 2015 (UTC).

I tried searching Unicode here for "thorn" but didn't find anything like "Thorn with e". That leaves your second option of "compositabilty", but I'm not sure that can be done either.--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 02:38, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

þͤ (U+00FE U+0364) is probably the right way to do it, but the e may end up in different places depending on the font and rendering library. The combining e has been in Unicode since version 3.2 (2002). -- BenRG (talk) 05:46, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Looks right on my system. I didn't know about the "combining e". Thanks for the info. For Mr. Farmbrough's reference, here's a link that also gives the "official" name of the character and its HTML coding.--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 06:33, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Is there a compelling reason why this character combination would have to be encoded as thorn with e above? The most common rendering I'm familiar with is simply a superscript "e" after the thorn, i.e. "þ^e", which seems quite sufficient to render the typical medieval English abbreviation. Fut.Perf. ☼ 09:23, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Yes, in the sense that this is the way the original was printed. No meaning would be lost even by "ye" or "the", but fidelity is good when it can be achieved. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 14:55, 22 November 2015 (UTC).

See diplomatic transcription. I've often spent piles of time looking for this kind of character when doing such transcriptions. Nyttend (talk) 01:24, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

I had a quick look at the "Medieval Unicode Font Initiative" [1], which has been working on fonts for these kinds of philological purposes and on recommendations for new Unicode characters for this field. They don't seem to envisage any extra character for this thorn+e combination, so it would seem they deemed either plain þ^e or U+0364 "combining Latin small letter e" sufficient for the purpose (or possibly þᵉ, with U+1D49 "modifier letter small e"?) Fut.Perf. ☼ 21:41, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

"firm going" and "rough going"

Experimental_Mechanized_Force#Exercises_and_results contains the phrases "firm going" and "rough going". Are these the British English way of saying "smooth terrain" and "rough terrain"? Are these expressions ("firm going" and "rough going") still in common usage? 731Butai (talk) 06:21, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

This type of use is very common when talking about race tracks. See Going (horse racing). I don't know if it is a common term in a military context. JMiall₰ 09:55, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

(edit conflict) They are borrowings from horse racing which is done on grass over here, so the state of the grass will affect the performance of the horses; some are better able to cope with poor conditions than others. Your interpretation is correct, although sometimes used in a more figurative way; "I found it heavy going" means that a task turned out to be harder work than it ought to have been ("heavy going" = very muddy). Alansplodge (talk) 10:01, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

In Detroit, I use "rough going ahead", but never "firm going". StuRat (talk) 23:11, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

"When the going gets tough, the tough get going" is attributed to Joe Kennedy, so it's not an exclusively English expression. Tevildo (talk) 23:41, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

I've heard that expression before, and my understanding was that the "going" refers to the situation and is unrelated to the horseracing term. Our article confirms this. 731Butai (talk) 02:16, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

That doesn't make sense. In both cases "the going" simply refers to the ability to go. In horse racing it'd be literally going somewhere, in the other expression metaphorical, but that doesn't make it "unrelated", and the article doesn't say it is. (Afterthought: what is different in the horse-racing expression is that the going is described in terms of what the track is like.)

Going_(horse_racing) says "going" refer to the *track* that the horses are racing on, not the fact that the horses are moving.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going says "in context, 'the going' means 'the situation'", as in, if someone says "Nice going!" to you, they meant "You did a good job!", and not "You did a good job because the ground was easy to move upon!".

• That's what I meant by "unrelated".731Butai (talk) 10:25, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

• Yes, you're reading it too literally. --70.49.170.168 (talk) 12:55, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

For another example of the usage, I've heard traffic reports in Toronto where conditions on a congested road are described as "slow going". In this case, literally. --70.49.170.168 (talk) 08:42, 23 November 2015 (UTC), edited 08:45, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Also, "let's go while the going is good" sounds somewhat Irish but it's perfectly cromulent in terms of the above equestrian references. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 17:45, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

I know that phrase well -- just sounds like baby boomer USian to me though :) SemanticMantis (talk) 22:31, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

It's been around (at least in the "get" version) since at least as far back as 1912. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 23:05, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I was edit-conflicted, but I was trying to say that the American version please, not USian, yuck is "get while the getting's good". It's not a Ferengi-type thing; "get" is being used in the sense of "make like a tree and get outta here". --Trovatore (talk) 23:07, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

I don't like "USian" either but I prefer it to implying that the other countries in the Americas don't exist or aren't important. Some of the issues are discussed at American_(word). SemanticMantis (talk) 15:31, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

I prefer "Make like a shepherd and get the flock outta here". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 05:57, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Just in case anyone didn't get Trovatore's malapropism (as originally spoken by Biff Tannen in the original Back to the Future film), the mixed metaphor is a result of two confused jokes "Make like a tree and leave" (using the dual definition of leaf/leave) and "Make like a bald man and get outta here" (using the dual definition of hair/here). --Jayron32 13:36, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

And because this is the language desk, we might as well give the horse another good wallop and point out that "leave" here is wikt:leave#Verb 3, "to produce leaves or foliage", which is a usage that I doubt was in either Biff's or Marty's active vocabulary. --Trovatore (talk) 00:24, 25 November 2015 (UTC)