Talk:Spooning (disambiguation)

Article life

I created the pages 'Spooning (disambiguation)' and 'Spooning' because I was amused to see that wikipedians seem to know only one meaning of the term "spooning" - Altenmann >t 08:36, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

As opening an edit of the enclosing section, will show you Template:article life generates a section with its own title as the article title. It seems to me probably intended for further phases in its life cycle, but its failure to inform later editors that "Article title" is more than two words pulled out of an editor's ear seems likely to doom it to be understood as reflecting just the section-creator's idiosyncratic choice of a cryptic title, unless someone adds to the section a comment including an eloquent utterance such as Whaaa....?
--Jerzy•t 03:38, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

Neglected page history

   OK, if you hover every link, you realize that the link in "only one meaning of the term spooning" is not redundant to the link preceding it, bcz it's piped to hide what may be the renaming of the pre-existing article among the pages being Dab'ed by the accompanying main-namespace page. Perhaps our colleague renamed "Spooning" to "Spoons sex position". OK, the page behind the piping is spooning (sex position), a Rdr to the article Spoons sex position. Does our colleague's piping above actually draw attention to an article that was the first page to bear the title "Spooning"? In case no one else clarifies that aspect, i'm keeping a tickler that in theory will make me eventually return to the relevant pages when i'm less tired of the topic.
--Jerzy•t 03:38, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

The "spooning" in the songs

   Besides ladling gruel into one's own (or a child's) mouth, one of the relatively early meanings of the verb "to spoon" is courtship-related, and apparently more restrained courtship than our disambiguation page can make clear. Some readers may be led to it by the Dab's Wikt link, but IMO the likelihood of confusion is so high that an article on either Spooning as courtship or Spooning (pre-modern) is in order, lest the average reader go away quoting WP as saying that clothed full body contact in courtship was widely acceptable by the early 20th century or even the Renaissance. The speculation of one dict i've already consulted is that the etymology reflects a (Welsh?) custom where a gift of a (fancy?) spoon corresponded to a modern engagement ring, but even in light of the uncertainty about that, the evidence is terribly far from establishing that the classic American songs that rhyme "spoon" and "June" are about even clothed body contact.
   At least the rule of thumb is that Dab pages don't include dictdefs. My own view is that even a relatively obscure and dated usage that causes confusion can be an encyclopedic topic, but this talk section does not necessarily require accepting that view in order to address this situation: part of our policy is IAR, and wp:NOTADICT does not require us to wash our hands about confused readers: IMO that close-to-nuclear option is sufficient to justify finding whatever mechanism we need to keep the two confusion-prone senses clear. I've never seen, for instance a N.B. on a Dab page, but that might be the least-harm solution, if an article on spooning in the sense of "vanilla" courtship cannot survive.
--Jerzy•t 03:38, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

Spooning (cuddling)

   Spooning is supposedly disambiguated in the accompanying Dab to include a sense that is a form of cuddling (presumably without intercourse), which links to Physical intimacy, an article that mentions cuddling twice, in lists:

• In a bullet list where it is unique in being the only unlinked entry and the only one-word entry (whereas the other three include examples of body parts contacted)
• In a prose list as one of four present participles, of which one of the others is, like it, a single word, and the remaining two specify a site of contact.

It is also the only term that appears in both lists.
   Thus the sum of the information on that sense of spooning, provided directly or via its link from the Dab page, is its being a form of cuddling that constitutes a form of physical intimacy found (presumably) between pairs who are in either "physically intimate" relationships or "platonic or family" ones.
   As a dict-def, i'd call it piss-poor; as to encyclopedic content on spooning in this sense, i can see none. I conclude that we have no encyclopedic information on the cuddling sense of spooning, and no business trying to even assist those inquiring after it to even find where we may someday have some. While i'm pleased with my work on the "cuddling" portion of the spooning Dab (while i was relying on the presumption that the links i found led to encyclopedic information on the cuddling sense of spooning), i am removing it from the accompanying Dab. I shall reproduce the markup here, for consideration by any interested editors at a time when we are in a position to make good use of it.
--Jerzy•t 07:39, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

   I had

• Embraces where back of one person's body meets front of another's:
  • Spooning (cuddling)
  • Spoons sex position for intercourse

and replaced it with

• Spoons sex position for intercourse embracing with back of one person's body meeting the front of another's
  --Jerzy•t 08:38, 11 January 2016 (UTC)