Danbooru

Tag Alias: plaster -> bandaid

Posted under General

I'd be against this because in American English "plaster" always means the material used for finishing walls, or for casting or carving sculptures from (See the entry for 'plaster' on Wikipedia ). The second link under a google search for 'plaster site:*.uk' would also indicate that this meaning holds true for British English as well.

With this sort of ambiguity an alias is a bad idea, because it's very likely to be misused and to pollute bandaid in the future.

Then create a wiki defining plaster as the building material and put "not to be confused with bandaid" at the top, anything so I don't have to spend 10 minutes hunting around for what word danbooru uses for adhesive bandages because the word I'd use has no posts.

Off topic: Please use [ [ wiki link ] ] rather than { { post search link } }. Note the help text to the right of the text box. (Though I'll admit, DText is woefully undocumented)

On topic: There's no way for me to search inside the tag history of a post as far as I'm aware. So if there ever was anything under plaster, we couldn't know and if there wasn't, then there's little point adding a whole alias when a quick wiki page will do (which I've just done), especially when the tag could be used for something else.

The problem isn't that we could qualify it if necessary (in which case I agree, plaster_(material) makes as much sense as anything due to the potential ambiguity and likely rarity of tagging a material).

The problem is that with aliases, it isn't always obvious that something you've applied was re-interpreted in a way other than you intended, this ends up adding garbage to the tag aliased to, and prevents the image from being linked to the intended concept.

Aliases really need to have a 100% correspondence with their predicate (everything the base tag makes sense to be labeled with the predicate tag).

For plaster, using google images as a rough guide to word sense distribution, the great majority of instances of "plaster" refer to the building / sculpting material (this is true even on images.google.co.uk, though the bandage proportion does go up).

It would probably be best to simply to use the qualified tag for the material if it ever comes up, bandaid for the bandage, and manually disambiguate between the two for everything that shows up in plaster, leaving a note in the wiki that the tag should ideally be left empty.

I would have to say the UK naming for this seems rather odd to me. Doesn't having the name "plaster" for it cause confusion between adhesive bandages and plaster bandages (bandages impregnated with plaster of paris used to make casts)?

The term originally applied to plaster bandages. Oxford English Dictionary's definition 1.a. for "plaster":

1.a. Originally: a solid medicinal or emollient substance spread on a bandage or dressing and applied to the skin, often becoming adhesive at body temperature (now rare or hist.). In later use: adhesive material, esp. tape, used to fix bandages or dressings in place; a piece or strip of this. Also: a small dressing consisting of an absorbent pad attached to a piece of adhesive material, used to cover a superficial wound.

It's a similar case to the British "torch" which no one in their right mind would interpret as a burning stick rather than a flashlight in modern times unless the context really gave you a good reason to.

Updated

NWF_Renim said:
Doesn't having the name "plaster" for it cause confusion between adhesive bandages and plaster bandages?

That's just how language works, context makes it obvious. Plaster (bandage) is a regular noun (a plaster) and plaster (building material) is a mass noun (some plaster). There are plenty of other words that have the exact same pronunciation.

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