Talk:hard-pressed

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hard-pressed

Rfd-redundant: Having or likely to have difficulty or to find a task almost impossible. I think this is a bad wording of "barely able", the newly added first sense. There is also another new sense. DCDuring TALK 01:48, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

Delete the sense. Sounds the same to me no matter which way I look at it. Jamesjiao → ^{T ◊ C} 03:18, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Can "barely able" always be replaced with "hard-pressed" or is the latter describing a specific aspect of being barely able? Obviously the person who added the second definition thinks so. If he's wrong, then delete. If he's right, one might consider combining the two [d]efinitions:

1. (idiomatic, usually with to-infinitive) Barely able, having or likely to have considerable or potentially insurmountable difficulty in completing a task.

   Although they are still available, I think we would be hard-pressed to find one on short notice. --Hekaheka 10:22, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

The obligatory substitution would have to be that "barely able" would replace "hard-pressed". I certainly don't think that "hard-pressed" could substitute for all uses of "barely able", though I think it would substitute for instances followed by a to-infinitive. DCDuring TALK 11:58, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Clean up, the two sense are the same, but the context label seems a bit bizarre. I've only just realised it means followed by a to-infinitive form, not preceded. So this to me is a cleanup issue more than an RFD one. Mglovesfun (talk) 10:25, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

A problem with the long part of the definition is that it is not "substitutable" for the headword, AFACIT. That is, one could not substitute the long definition for "head-pressed" in a sentence with the result being correct grammatically. It seems to me to be a highly desirable feature of definitions and synonyms.

In Longmans's DCE and some other learner's dictionaries, "with" notes often appear. They always refer to what optionally or mandatorily follows the headword for a particular meaning.

A problem with our process is that the abundant instances of this kind of definition problem are not readily repaired if we are scrupulous about RfD. We haven't even established that "substitutability" is a requirement for all definitions that are not non-gloss definitions. I don't even recall the notion of "substitutability" ever being mentioned, except once or twice by me. DCDuring TALK 11:58, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Sense removed.​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:59, 31 January 2011 (UTC)