Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Enfant terrible (2nd nomination)

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete‎. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 08:33, 27 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Enfant terrible[edit]

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Pure WP:DICDEF with no hope of expansion (and no success in doing so since its last AfD nomination nearly 20 years ago). Graham (talk) 06:48, 12 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of France-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU^(T) 10:16, 12 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A lot of things have been tried, looking at the edit history, from soft redirects to discussions of video game characters. Looking for sourcing turns up nothing concrete to use, although the one thing that hasn't been thoroughly tried, I notice, is the cargo cult encyclopaedia writing way of grabbing every instance of anyone ever being called an enfant terrible and hoping that a discussion of a concept magically arises from the pile. Of course, that ranges from Marlon Brando to Peter Sellers, and wouldn't work. Uncle G (talk) 14:19, 12 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

How about trying our hand at Enfant terrible in popular culture? Haha! Geschichte (talk) 18:40, 12 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Delete: The term is used [1], but that's not helpful (I know it's a non-RS, but it's simply an example). Use of a phrase isn't what makes notability here. This is a DICDEF. Oaktree b (talk) 15:28, 12 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Language-related deletion discussions. WCQuidditch ☎ ✎ 20:37, 12 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Comment - If not kept, should be redirected to Les Enfants Terribles (disambiguation). Currently leaning keep, although discussion of the term is pretty scant. The term is briefly theorized in this journal article. Based on reviews, I suspect the term is discussed at length in this book, and that book may cite other sources (in French?) that we could use. Suriname0 (talk) 21:50, 12 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the deletion sorting lists for the following topics: Journalism and Literature. Suriname0 (talk) 21:52, 12 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Also leaning keep, although I admit it's difficult to winnow sources with significant coverage from the many simple usages of the expression. The book (available on archive.org) located by Suriname0 is a good start; it does indeed discuss the topic at some length. An excerpt from the introduction:

Teenage girls are present in all of these media images of youth, but not in the same causal relationship with politics and history as their male counterparts. Within the peer group or the family as imagined by films, popular novels, feature articles, and news stories, bad girls were, instead, positioned as enfants terribles: in the Petit Robert dictionary, "personnes qui se signalent par une certaine turbulence, dans un groupe" [individuals who make themselves known in a group by virtue of a noticeable turbulence]-that group being alternately the age category "youth" and the gendered category of femininity. The best-known literary example is a brother and sister pair: Paul and Elisabeth in Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants terribles, a 1929 novel he adapted to film with director Jean-Pierre Melville in 1948.

Enfant terrible is also a mythological archetype in certain West African cultures; see Enfant terrible (folklore) and sources such as [2] and [3]. I am uncertain if there is a connection between that meaning and the French idiom. I suspect if there are sources that make this connection, or additional sources covering the origin and history of the expression, they will be in French. Jfire (talk) 05:34, 13 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, asilvering (talk) 22:40, 19 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Delete: Wikipedia articles don't describe words, they describe objects. The book and the journal article discussed above are examples of the use of the term, but they don't describe a thing that Wikipedia should name Enfant terrible. The journal article uses it to mean ringleader, and the book is a discussion of girlhood in French culture. Having an article on the enfant terrible is like having an article on the cool dude. It's clearly a dicdef. HansVonStuttgart (talk) 11:30, 24 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

In fact, we do have an article for dude. Suriname0 (talk) 16:29, 24 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

And for enfant and El Terrible. HansVonStuttgart (talk) 16:55, 24 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Delete - WP:NOTDIC Mr Vili talk 06:39, 27 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.