Talk: Proverb

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Root beer[]

Removed "In 2373, Worf claimed there was a Klingon proverb that stated "You cannot loosen a man's tongue with root beer." (DS9: "Rapture")". I placed the quoting in its rightful place of the Klingon proverbs. Because Worf stated it in (DS9: "Rapture"), it is canon. --LtCmdr-Vulcan 08:20, 8 July 2007 (UTC)

Revenge is a dish best served cold[]

Alrighty, where shall we merge this to? --From Andoria with Love 19:07, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

How 'bout one of the sections where it's mentioned on the Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan page, i.e. "Notes"? - Bridge 19:13, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

A literature page about proverb(s), as I'm sure there are others, like "Never turn your back on a Breen". --Alan 19:52, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Guess we already had it in such a place. --Alan 19:53, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Ah-ha, then I suppose we should merge it to the proverbs page? Yes, that sounds like a good plan to me. I'll add the merge template to the page and we can see if anyone disagrees with it within the next few days. If not, we can merge. Otherwise, probably just delete it. --From Andoria with Love 21:38, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Merge. Some of this info would be useful for background on that easily overlooked page.– Cleanse 00:57, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

This could potentially be salvaged into its own article if the phrase has some sort of significance in the Trek universe, or outside it, beyond a proverb and catch phrase. As it stands, however, it leaves me saying "so what?" insofar as there's simply not enough substance to justify a separate article. Relegate it to background information and elsewhere as mentioned above. Scholasticitous 13:03, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Alrighty, it's been merged. The article's contents can now be found within Proverb's history, should we decided to start adding background notes on each phrase. --From Andoria with Love 08:33, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

Moved from pages for deletion

This article seems to be just an analysis of the phrase, and isn't even in the Star Trek POV. Even if it was in the POV, it only serves to define the phrase. As other similar articles have been removed or altered (the recent Communism article, the Shakespeare and Star Trek article, this one should be removed as well.--31dot 21:33, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Seems like we already had a discussion going here discussing what to do with it, why start a second? -Alan 21:35, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

I did overlook that discussion(and I apologize) but I am not entirely certain any mention of this phrase is warranted.--31dot 21:38, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Since there was already a discussion underway on the article's talk page, may I suggest merging/moving this discussion there? --From Andoria with Love 21:41, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

That's fine with me.(Sorry it took so long to get back to you.)--31dot 23:00, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Alrighty then, merged. Everyone, please continue this discussion in the "Merge" section above. --From Andoria with Love 02:46, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Practice makes perfect[]

Expressions don't get pages of their own, they get an entry on proverbs. Or in this case, I guess a background note. -- Capricorn (talk) 12:52, February 5, 2016 (UTC)

Support merge. -- Defiant (talk) 13:45, February 5, 2016 (UTC)

Second that. -- LauraCC (talk) 19:57, March 1, 2016 (UTC)

It's been over 3 months. -- LauraCC (talk) 19:40, May 12, 2016 (UTC)

My apologies, sulfur. I should've mentioned this at the same time you were adding genie to "metaphor". -- LauraCC (talk) 19:42, May 12, 2016 (UTC)

Gift horse[]

Whoever suggested the merge with metaphor, I would tend to agree with. A gift horse is a horse given as a gift, awkward phrasing aside (we don't say "gift car" or "gift computer" generally these days). Putting the phrase "look a gift horse in the mouth" on metaphor makes more sense. --LauraCC (talk) 15:30, March 14, 2018 (UTC)

Agreed, Merge. There's no distinct concept of a gift horse, it's just part of an expression about something being done with a horse -- Capricorn (talk) 07:00, March 15, 2018 (UTC)

Metaphor is a dead bloated horse constantly at risk for more exposure to the blazing Nevada sun. She canna take it, Captn'! We're still milking a concept, a list page of metaphors, that is 7+ years old. There is room to wiggle on this site for continuous growth and finding alternatives for housing the 60+ internal entries on the metaphor page, a lot of which haven't been expanded upon yet, and are simply generic phases with no context and half a dozen episodes cited to a single entry. If there are multiple examples of a commonly used example (i.e. "I'm a doctor, not a...") then there really shouldn't be a reason why this, that or the other can't stand alone anymore. --Alan (talk) 11:37, March 15, 2018 (UTC)

The difference is that "I'm a doctor, not a..." is a phrase which is deliberately used in the script as a nod to McCoy's frequent protests. Not that such phrases began with him, but in Star Trek the usage is often for that reason. I agree, that page is awful big. I suppose maybe we could split it up into "Food metaphors" (hand in the cookie jar, etc), "animal metaphors" (gift horse, etc), like we do for athletic parlance rather than having a "parlance derived from various fields" page. --LauraCC (talk) 15:39, March 15, 2018 (UTC)

If we're really going to discuss this (in which case the discussion should be moved there), I think the root of the bloat lies in the 2012 merge of proverb and idiom into a broad list of every kind of metaphor, of which some continued to be done brief and list-like like [1], while arbitrarily others followed the mini-article style that idiom had when it was still a somewhat small article. [2]. My point being, before thinking about splitting along thematic lines, we should probably think about how to diffuse that kludge. Or, we could of course go the path of least headache and do as Alan says, start giving idioms pages again. -- Capricorn (talk) 06:21, March 16, 2018 (UTC)

I'm having a hard time remembering why it was a good idea to merge all those pages into one without foreseeing what it has become. I'm for leaving this alone right now, and if we have to, use categorization and link-backs on the metaphor page to keep track of it, because if, in theory, metaphors was actually expanded from a list of metaphors use, to become an actual detailed list explaining their use, you've have a lot of entries like this one on that page, and then we would start getting into parser issues with page size and too many links. Maybe we need to cherry pick a few that are some of the more comprehensive entries and extract them too. --Alan (talk) 18:43, October 5, 2018 (UTC)

Merged. --Alan (talk) 12:51, March 19, 2019 (UTC)

Word choice[]

Just for the record: changed "etymology" into "origin". Etymology is only about the origins of words, it doesn't apply to proverbs.Hurga (talk) 13:06, 5 March 2025 (UTC)