Talk:Love On Top

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: Move unopposed, rough consensus (non-admin closure) — Andy W. (talk · ctb) 21:22, 13 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Love on Top → Love On Top – Similar to the ongoing request at Talk:Dancing on My Own, and per MOS:CAPS, "on" in this case is not used specifically as a preposition, but as part of a compound adjective "on top".  — Amakuru (talk) 20:33, 2 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

• Support, but it's a compound preposition, not a compound adjective (there is no object noun for it to modify; it's the same construction as "Love Outside" (subject noun, preposition that requires no object), not "Love from Space" (subject noun, unitary preposition, object), or "Love, Hot and Stinky" (subject noun, adjective phrase modifying the subject, which requires a comma, and is obscure Yoda-like syntax). MOS:CT says to capitalize '... [t]he first word in a compound preposition (e.g. "Time Out of Mind", "Get Off of My Cloud").' This advice is actually slightly misleading, because subsequent words would also be capitalize unless they are short prepositions that would normally not be capitalized. Needs to be updated with cases like this there were not thought of by whoever wrote that. I've editing that section to cover this; we'll see if it sticks.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  08:26, 7 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: no consensus. There does not seem to be a consensus on the part of speech of "on". (closed by non-admin page mover) ~ Aseleste (t, e | c, l) 11:16, 28 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Love On Top → Love on Top – MOS:TITLECAPS -----FMSky (talk) 01:33, 25 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This is a contested technical request (permalink).   Kadzi   (talk) 21:27, 25 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Support per MOS:CT. on is a preposition here, and it has less than five letters, so it should not be capitalized. Darkday (talk) 22:15, 26 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Comment For reference, see the requested move above that supports the current title: Talk:Love On Top#Requested move 2 August 2016. Pinging Amakuru and SMcCandlish in case they would like to comment. – Lord Bolingbroke (talk) 22:24, 26 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  You may want to read WP:CAN. Darkday (talk) 06:44, 27 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  @Darkday: notifying all of the participants in the previous RM is not canvassing. Especially as both yourself and the nominator have completely failed to explain why the valid reasons for the current title that were given in the previous RM are not longer valid.  — Amakuru (talk) 07:53, 27 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  Per WP:APPNOTE, it is appropriate to notify editors who have participated in previous discussions on the same topic. That the two editors who participated in the previous discussion support the current title is coincidental. I personally have no strong opinion on the matter (I needed to look up what a compound preposition was lol). – Lord Bolingbroke (talk) 15:23, 27 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  From WP:CAN: "if notices are sent to editors who previously supported deleting an article, then identical notices should be sent to those who supported keeping it." If that's not possible, then I think no notices should be sent at all. Darkday (talk) 16:17, 27 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  If there had been editors who opposed the previous RM I would have notified them as well (like I said, I have no strong opinion on the title). The fact that the previous discussion was unanimous does not preclude notifying its participants. – Lord Bolingbroke (talk) 16:34, 27 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose. Nothing has changed since the last RM. The "on" here is not a preposition in the conventional sense, as in there's love on some entity called top. "on top" is in fact a compound adjective, so should be all capitalized as part of this title-case name.  — Amakuru (talk) 06:40, 27 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  I agree with you that "on top" is behaving adjectivally in this title. I don't think it is a compound adjective though. That would be something like "part-time", "brand-new" or "never-ending". I think the correct classification is adjectival phrase. While the Wikipedia MOS states that adjectives should be capitalized, I don't think that this covers adjectival phrases as well. This would be like saying that "the" should be capitalized in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" because it is the first word of the noun phrase "the deathly hallows." Instead, the components of a noun phrase are capitalized individually according to their world class, and I believe the same applies to adjectival phrases. "on top" is composed of a preposition and a noun, and short prepositions are lowercased, hence "Love on Top." Darkday (talk) 17:03, 27 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  @Darkday: yeah, sorry I used the wrong term I think. What I meant was it's a compound preposition, as outlined by SMcCandlish above. MOS:TITLECAPS covers this sort of thing, when it says "The first word in a compound preposition" is always capitalised. CHeers  — Amakuru (talk) 17:09, 28 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  @Amakuru: Prepositions are used to express a relationship between two objects: The cat is in the box. A story about a girl. The underlined phrases are called the complement of the preposition. This also applies to compound prepositions: I got a call out of the blue. In "Love on Top", I think "on" is a preposition and "top" is its complement: Love on Top. If you consider "on top" to be a compound preposition, then where is its complement?

  This can also be approached from another angle. If you look at lists of compound prepositions (for example, here or here), you'll notice that the last word is always a regular preposition: along with, apart from, next to, out of. "on top" doesn't match that pattern. "on top of" is a compound preposition, maybe this is where the confusion comes from. But "on top" isn't. Darkday (talk) 21:06, 29 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  @Darkday: but "top" in the sense we're talking about here is not an entity in the same way that "the box" or "a girl" would be. The "top" can't be separated from the "on" because they go together. Merriam Webster specifically links them together (and calls them an "idiom"). Think of it as a synonym for "atop", which means much the same thing as "on top" except that it uses one word rather than two to express the concept. And there is no particular necessity for a preposition to be followed by another word - as I say, this song could have been called "Love Atop". Or it could also have been "Love Within", "Love Outside". In all those cases we would capitalise the latter word, and "On Top" is the same.  — Amakuru (talk) 21:51, 29 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  @Amakuru: Yes, "on top" is an idiom, but idiom is not a word class, and MOS:CT mentions no special rules regarding idioms. Merriam-Webster also calls "on trial" and "in error" idioms. So would you advocate capitalizing "on" in "Murder on Trial in Italy" and "in" in "Paid in Error"? In "Love Atop/Outside/Within", the last word is an adverb, not a preposition. You can check the adverb examples at Merriam-Webster, for example, "The sign on the door says 'Help Wanted: Inquire Within.'" For the use of "atop" as an adverb, there is an example at Wiktionary: "... his head is bald atop, though hardly from the uneasiness of wearing a crown." So there is no object in "Love Atop/Outside/Within", because atop/outside/within are not used as prepositions here. But in "on top" we have a preposition followed by an object. Darkday (talk) 23:42, 30 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  No it's not "the same". We would capitalize the final word in "Love Atop" or "Love Within" because title case capitalizes the first and last word no matter what they are. Also, atop and within are often adjectives, not adverbs (they are usually adjectives, in fact). The adverbial uses are directly derived from the adjectival ones (seems to have happened in the Elizabethan period), and it is not in fact possible to determine that, say, "Love [a|A]top" is adverbial without further lyrical proof (i.e. a longer sentence that is provably using it adverbially, and a lack of any adjectival use of the same construction in the work). So atop would normally get lower-cased, in mid-title, on Wikipedia per MOS:5LETTER: "Love atop the World", for example (where love is a noun; adverbial use would be something like To Love Atop the World where love is a verb). Whether something is "an idiom" or not is irrelevant. (Aside: Everything in a language is idiomatic in one sense or another. If I write "I am to be feeling my heat is of discomfort" (for 'I feel uncomfortably hot') that comes across as not proper English because it is using non-idiomatic collocations and morphological choices that, while not producing a true grammar error, seem to be either idiolect or the improper application by a learner of norms from another language.) Next, things do not become "un-prepositions" when their objects are abstract instead of concrete, so that's a red herring. "I stood on principle" has a preposition in it no less than does "I stood on an anthill and got bitten a lot."

  What matters is whether we're dealing with a phrasal verb or a compound preposition, two cases for upper-casing. Here, we have a truncated compound preposition, on top [of] [something/someone]. You can tell when something is a phrasal verb that contains a preposition that has been converted into a phrasal-verb particle and thus gets capitalized, generally by whether or not the meaning has become divorced from the normal prepositional sense(s). E.g., look up and look [it] up in reference to a dictionary or database is a phrasal verb, because the described action has nothing to do with turning ones eyes/head/gaze upward. Here, being on top [of] retains the original senses, both of physical position (the on-top sexual position) and of metaphoric position (also found in "I'm feeling on top of the world"). However, WP also upper-cases the first word of compound prepositions (even if that word is under 5 letters), and we don't have a codified exception to lower-case ones that are truncated. Given this, and the fact that whether it's really an adverbial usage anyway would require detailed lyrics analysis (which should be done very carefully here if at all, for copyright reasons), it should arguably be upper-case, but this really is an edge case, and I would not be terribly opposed to it going the other way. That would be more WP:CONSISTENT.

  If we go lower-case, we would need to clarify the MoS rule about this to make the answer clearer next time. It really comes down to whether we, as a community, want to be "fiddly" about such matters, or try to simplify them (in ways that some might find to be over-simplification). I think the latter is the most likely, long-term, because it is easier to apply a rule whether everyone is happy about it or not, than to keep re-litigating the same questions over and over, often with inconsistent results. We've had similar problems with foreign language titles, human job and position and heritable titles, dashes, and several other style matters where MoS had unnecessarily complex rules that have over time simplied but left some people dissatisfied. The overall disruption level of a few being disgruntled versus years of recurrent re-re-re-fighting of the same subjects is pretty obvious math. But it's not enough to make me "demand" lower-case at this time. PS: I will observe that the MoS exception to lower-casing of short "preposition words" when they are part of phrasal verbs, is a long-running and stable one, while the exception for compound prepositions is recent (I think I added it myself, in an attempt to codify the results of several RMs; I don't think it's been subject to an RfC or other more formal "should MoS say X, or say Y, or remain silent on it?" discussion.)
   — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:53, 3 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

• Oppose. As stated, on is not a preposition in this title. So it should be left as is. Andrewa (talk) 08:14, 3 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Opppose per WP:MYPERSONALOPINION. It just feels right in this case to go with "Love On Top". I might feel different about "Love on the Beach". It's like you know that "great green dragon" is OK and "green great dragon". There is a kinda-sorta rule about that somewhere (derived purely from observing use), but mostly you can just tell what feels right. I know, it's just my opinion, but come on. That is how people talk... I don't know the rule for who vs whom etc but I know that "to who are you speaking" feels wrong. Sure we're more formal here (a little) but we need to be idiomatic. In this particular case, headcount should actually matter, if there's a reasonable quorum, rather than arguments about plusperfect sesquisential vs pluralist adjectiverb for whatever. Herostratus (talk) 19:11, 12 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]
• Support – to me, it's a preposition. I don't understand SMcCandlish's opinion in the other direction in the previous RM. Dicklyon (talk) 03:26, 13 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]