Talk:Herding cats

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Cleanup[edit]

This page was marked for cleanup per MoS:DAB. I removed the following entries because they sound like advertising for non-notable books:

Herding Cats, Multiparty Mediation in a Complex World, a study of multiparty mediation edited by Chester Crocker, Fen Hampson and Pamela Aall
Herding Cats: A Primer for Programmers Who Lead Programmers by J. Hank Rainwater

I also moved the saying over to Herding cats (linguistics). – sgeureka ^t•c 15:50, 18 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hi sgureka,

I understand why you moved those entries. I don't know who put the Crocker one back in. I put Rainwater back in because it's the earliest published reference I can find for using the phrase to refer to programmers. Some websites attribute the association with programmers to Dave S Platt. He's still on LinkedIn, so I've contacted him for comment.

In reference to the unsigned comment below yours, I'm wondering what the best place is for etymologies, or the origin of quotes or phrases. Not Wikipedia at all? If I get some information together I could submit it to quoteinvestigator.com. A quick search indicates this phrase isn't in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

At least, now that we have some earlier references, we could probably cull the list of book titles again? What do you think?

bpalmerau Bpalmerau (talk) 04:23, 10 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Culture Metaphor Is Not Encyclopedic[edit]

Cliches and cultural metaphors are worthy knowledge for educated and intellectually accomplished people. It is good to have a reference source that makes it possible for people to narrow down and standardize such metaphors, but encyclopedias are meant to be about achievement, knowledge and a composite of common understanding. Metaphor is about how the store of cultural understanding is expressed. Semantics belong in the public discussion, but in a different format than an encyclopedia. Wikipedia grows constantly and it provides a wider range of inclusion continuously. How far can Wikipedia go toward be a universal repository without being nothing more than just another search engine. "Hit the hay" was a cultural expression used earlier in the twentieth century to mean "go to bed." It's a nice expression, but does it belong in the cultural archives of an encyclopedia? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tn2si58c (talk • contribs) 18:40, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]