Talk:you can take the monkey out of the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of the monkey

Ethnic slur; non-gloss definition

(Labelling things like this as ethnic slurs is discussed in the August Tea Room.) Re the edits to the definition: for slogans like this where we don't want to suggest (by stating it in wikivoice) the slogan's claim is true, IMO we could resort to {{non-gloss definition}}s. That's what I did at bi now, gay later, because saying "bi people become exclusively gay over time" in wikivoice as if it's a fact was/is plainly wrong. - -sche (discuss) 04:10, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for this, I was wondering how to rephrase it. AG202 (talk) 10:17, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

@Equinox there’s a strong reason why we should not be openly stating it in Wikivoice. @-sche point is extremely pertinent here. AG202 (talk) 11:36, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

The overwhelming majority of entries in Category:English proverbs are defined this way (compare e.g. attack is the best form of defence), that doesn't mean we agree with it. It's just a natural consequence of how glosses work. {{ngd}} should in my opinion only be used if it's difficult or impossible to use a gloss; Template:non-gloss definition/documentation and WT:STYLE#Types_of_definitions seem to share this opinion. Glosses are, if possible, superior because they are congruous with the overwhelming majority of our definitions besides just being shorter and easier to read. I agree with Equinox that it is weird if we do everything one way (define glossable senses using glosses) except for one kind of entry (racist) of one kind of PoS (proverb), though not weird enough for me to participate in the edit wars. Moreover, if we use {{ngd}} here to express our objections with the content, it implies that we agree with all the proverbs for which we don't do this. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 11:56, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

+1: Well put. Proverb gloss definitions are not in wikivoice; they state what the phrase conveys, whether true or false (often false). --Dan Polansky (talk) 12:38, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

Plucking a selection from the first screen of Category:English proverbs: a buck's a buck, a camel is a horse designed by a committee (which is worded as a non-gloss despite not being italicized as such, as a separate issue), a good deed is its own reward, a hit dog will holler, sticks in a bundle are unbreakable, are all fairly neutral in terms of content and accuracy; at worst, the one about the camel is what, offending people who think committees actually work well sometimes? When we gloss e.g. iron as "A common, inexpensive metal, silvery grey when untarnished, that rusts, is attracted by magnets, and is used in making steel." we're stating facts about it. We notably don't gloss Holohoax as "The hoax that six million Jews died in the 'Holocaust', supposedly as the result of a conspiracy by the Nazis to kill them." as if the Holocaust really was a hoax; we convey in the wording of the definition (combined with the label) that it's only a hoax in the view of Holocaust deniers. We need to avoid stating a racist lie as an objective truth in wikivoice here on par with "[Iron is] A common, inexpensive metal, silvery grey when untarnished, that rusts"; if the objection is to the use of {{ngd}}, perhaps we can find a way to reword the gloss, like Holohoax (or, indeed, the one about the camel) conveys things within the gloss without italics. If the objection is that we should state racist lies as objective wikivoice facts, that should probably be brought up for broader discussion. - -sche (discuss) 16:49, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

Basically: if we do everything one way (we write glosses which are accurate statements: a wheel really is "A circular device capable of rotating on its axis...", wine really is "An alcoholic beverage made by fermenting grape juice..."), it'd be weird to do differently (cast racist lies as accurate statements) for just one kind of entry (racist) of one kind of POS (proverb). - -sche (discuss) 19:39, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

When iron is defined using gloss X, the fact is that "'iron' refers to X". When proverb P is glossed using G, the fact is that "P conveys that G". There is no direct analogy; the trick is that definitions are usually not sentences, but that is not the case with proverbs, which may created the impression that the gloss is in wiki voice, but it isn't. --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:47, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

And false proverbs are very easy to find: cold hands, warm heart: "Having cold hands is an indication of warmheartedness". Well, it isn't. The falsity usually does not offend anyone, and that is the difference that causes this disagreement. --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:52, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

As for a camel is a horse designed by a committee, its definition is suboptimal by not being a gloss one and this practice does not seem to match the majority of proverbs. But I do not have any statistics, just random look at our proverb definitions. Surely some of the proverbs use non-gloss definitions, but most use gloss definitions, and those that use non-gloss definitions can be reworked to use gloss definitions. --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:59, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

@-sche: I think there's some subtlety going on that breaks your argument. The truth-value proposition that Wiktionary asserts as being true is page name = definition (let's forget about lemmas with multiple senses for the sake of the argument). We assert that iron = A common, inexpensive metal, ... which is a true statement, and for the entry at hand, we assert that you can take the monkey ... = Black people behave ... which is also a true statement. The truth value of the definition alone is irrelevant. In fact, in most cases the definition doesn't even have a truth value, as is the case for iron: the phrase A common, inexpensive metal, ... has no truth value. Sometimes the definition alone does have a truth value (the definitions of most proverbs for instance) but that is irrelevant to the larger conversation because it's not the truth value of the definition that Wiktionary asserts as being true, it's the truth value of the page name = definition proposition; the truth value of definitions alone has never mattered to us (as evidenced by the facts that, one, the majority of proverbs are defined using a simple gloss and, two, that most definitions don't even have a truth value) as we are not in the business of doing fact checks. — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 20:30, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

I'm willing to believe that you think of it that way, but ordinary readers obviously don't, since they repeatedly try to correct incorrect definitions, as here. We define e.g. Breton as "A person from Brittany", whereas we define Amazon not as "A person from a race of female warriors inhabiting the Black Sea" but as "(Greek mythology) A member of a mythical race of female warriors inhabiting the Black Sea area", because even though the author of some romance novel who says "and then the hero kissed the Amazon" is using it to mean the hero kissed a person from a race of female warriors, not that the hero made a kissy face at thin air — the author treating the Amazons as actually existing, in the novel — they are in fact mythical. Racists think the Holocaust was a hoax and Black people are inherently criminal/badly behaved, but because these aren't accurate in the way Paris being "The capital and largest city of France." is, we don't define Hoaxocaust as "The hoax that Jews were murdered in a 'holocaust'." or "The fictitious 'genocide' of Jews that supposedly happened in the 1940s." even though that is what the people who use it mean by it and hence such a definition would be "true" from your [page name] = [definition] standpoint, and we don't define this as if Black people are inherently criminal/badly behaved. - -sche (discuss) 21:08, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

Exactly this. AG202 (talk) 21:11, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

(outdent) The following is not what the proverb conveys: "Black people, in the view of racists, behave badly regardless of their whereabouts or socialization". The user of the proverb does not intend to convey that the claim is so only in view of racists; he intends to convey the claim in an unqualified manner. And the sense line is already labeled offensive, so I don't understand how a competent reader could mistake the gloss for wikivoice, thinking that Wiktionary agrees with this particular proverb although it disagrees with other false proverbs. --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:23, 10 September 2022 (UTC)

@-sche: @AG202: I very strongly disagree. We by default never "agree" with our definitions since they are simply definitions or paraphrases. For example, "a stitch in time saves nine" (you should have done it earlier) is the opposite of "don't count your chickens before they're hatched" (you should wait until later), but we include both, and define both. We aren't agreeing with either by defining them. Entries relating to race (sex, age, whatever) should not get some special treatment either. This is a very harmful precedent, yes, more harmful to the free speech of a neutral dictionary than to "what if our readers are too dumb to use a dictionary?". Educate them then. But not by distorting the data. If somebody sees a bad math paper and believes a wrong graph, you don't say "oh no, we must change the graph", rather you teach the student how to read a paper and how to recognise bad science. Equinox ◑ 00:35, 17 September 2022 (UTC)

I would therefore revert it again but I know I'm in a minority here. Posterity can do it for me. Equinox ◑ 00:35, 17 September 2022 (UTC)

etymology

i saw this in Calvin & Hobbes around 1990 with tiger (of course) as the animal being compared. i doubt Watterson was just using a sanitized version of a common racist phrase. So that means this phrase must have a history, and we should be able to track it down to the original. Maybe tiger was the original animal after all, or maybe it was a monkey, but intended with a literal meaning. Or maybe leopard? Since we have another similar proverb involving a leopard. I dont really have any leads but there must be something to this. Thanks, —Soap— 06:09, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

I see now that you can take the person out of the place, but you can't take the place out of the person includes an attestation going back to 1914. To be honest, I had simply ignored that link at first since I assumed it was a modern euphemism of some sort. I think that it should be moved to Appendix:English snowclones since that is where we put phrases that need to have gaps filled in order to be understood.—Soap— 06:16, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

Re moving ...take the place... to the snowclones appendix: in general I agree phrases that need placeholders (other than someone / one or, apparently, something, which several entries use as a placeholder) should be moved to the Snowclones appendix, but ...take the place.... may be saved (now that we allow online cites) by the fact that I see hits for that exact, generic wording in publications like the Orange County Tribune and Southern Living and the website of Audit Wales. (Perhaps we should still also have an entry in the Snowclones appendix...) - -sche (discuss) 06:37, 11 September 2022 (UTC)