Talk:laser beam

Deletion discussion

The following information passed a request for deletion.

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

---

laser beam

Baseball sense. Just a metaphor. SemperBlotto (talk) 15:41, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

Keep Cited with unambiguous noun usage:

• 2005, Dallas Woodburn, 3 A.m.: A Collection of Short Stories, iUniverse →ISBN

  The batter hit a laser-beam to right field. A run for Cincinnati! Now the score was five to three.

• 2009, P.J. Dragseth, Eye for Talent: Interviews with Veteran Baseball Scouts, McFarland →ISBN, page 37

  When in doubt, so I threw my best fastball. Mantle hit a laser beam past my right knee.

• 2012, Paul Kocak, Baseball's Starry Night: Reliving Major League Baseball's 2011 Wild Card Night of Shock and Awe, Digitature →ISBN, page 152

  Just as he finished that sentence, Evan Longoria hit a laser beam over the left field fence. The Red Sox season was over in a flash.

• 2014, Scott Simkus, Outsider Baseball: The Weird World of Hardball on the Fringe, 1876–1950, Chicago Review Press →ISBN, page 116

  The Bloomer Girls played a respectable brand of baseball, to be sure, but they didn't throw 350-foot laser beams from deep center, or chew Red Man during ballgames.

Smurrayinchester (talk) 16:51, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

(I don't know much about baseball, but there are a couple of mentions of "throwing a laser beam". Is that compatible with the definition as it stands?) Smurrayinchester (talk) 16:55, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

• Keep: verifiable and not SOP. Purplebackpack89 17:00, 6 March 2015 (UTC)

• All those usages look like metaphors to me. SemperBlotto (talk) 08:46, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

Well yes, they're metaphors in the sense that Evan Longoria didn't literally hit a pulse of coherent photons over the left field fence. But a daisy cutter doesn't literally cut daisies and a worm burner doesn't burn worms. It seems to be solely a baseball term (I couldn't find any relevant hits for "cricket" + "laser beam". "football" + "hit a laser beam" gets a couple of results in American local papers, but even there, most of the results are for baseball - the fact I can't find any UK usage at all suggests that it's sport journalists who have been roped in to cover school soccer games using their more familiar baseball jargon) and, dare I use those dreaded words, a set phrase. Smurrayinchester (talk) 10:23, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

Keep, I think. There's evidently some figurative sense (something like a beeline?), whether restricted to baseball or not, and its existence isn't deducible from the physics sense. Equinox ◑ 15:45, 7 March 2015 (UTC)

Possibly generalize the sense instead of deleting. Even as a metaphor, how obvious is it that laser beam means something travelling quickly in a straight line. 95.144.169.113 17:59, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

Keep per Equinox. the sense can be generalized if there are citations showing that it is more general than the current wording suggests, but Smurrayinchester's comments above suggest it may not be general, it may indeed be limited to baseball. - -sche (discuss) 18:16, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

I've added the synonyms (hypernyms?) rocket and bullet and the synonym laser. None of those have a baseball-specific sense — not should they IMO. I don't know that laser beam should either. frozen rope might be another one. DCDuring TALK 18:51, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

Citations for popular-sports use is abundant at Google News. Most sports journalism never gets into books, thankfully. I think some of these terms are used in many sports, like American and other football, hockey, as well as baseball. DCDuring TALK 19:12, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

I'm going to be BOLD and create frozen rope. A frozen rope isn't really a thing even in Alaska. Purplebackpack89 13:53, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

• What about other metaphors using laser beam? It is often used about attention and criticism. DCDuring TALK 22:56, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

If you can be bothered to collect some examples, then hopefully we could come up with a single figurative sense that covers them all. (Such a sense is still worth having, IMO, to show that "laser beam" is used figuratively on a regular basis. Something like "particle accelerator" could conceivably be used as a metaphor for a situation with rapid collisions, e.g. between conflicting doctrines, but the fact is that it isn't.) Equinox ◑ 23:11, 9 March 2015 (UTC)

The aspects of a laser that are drawn on for metaphors seem to be 'straightness', 'intensity', 'accuracy', and 'destructiveness'. Usually it's laser rather than laser beam. I'll leave this to Purp. He needs practice applying ELE and coming up with defintions supported by evidence. DCDuring TALK 02:11, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Why is it suddenly my job to do this? And why have we arbitrarily decided we need just one sense? Purplebackpack89 02:24, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

I suppose DCD was satirically drawing attention to your habit of making binary decisions without any actual logic or thought behind them. Remember: don't disagree with Purplebackpack! When anyone disagrees with Purple, it's "open season", and some kind of aggressive attack, and they need to be "called off", to restrain themselves. And yet when Purple makes an attack, it's important and worthwhile, even though it goes against every basic law of logic that was well understood thousands of years ago by Plato. We need to smack this kind of shit down. If we are willing to be trampled, then our (hopefully) neutral definitions will be overwritten by some currently faddish biased party. It might be the Tumblr "SJWs", or their enemies, the "red-pill" misogynists, but either way... we need to be constantly vigilant that we are making any kind of fucking sense and not following rubbish and illogic, such as Purple's. Equinox ◑ 03:02, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

You know, Equinox, if you wanted me to think you weren't aggressively attacking me, you should dial down the rhetoric. Your above post is pretty damn aggressive. Furthermore, the claim that I put no thought or logic into my votes is false. All I do is come to a conclusion you find an anathema. Purplebackpack89 03:54, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Kept. bd2412 T 17:36, 31 March 2015 (UTC)