Talk:White noise (slang)

Merge article

The White noise page is entirely technical. Merging the slang artical with it would be/look odd and effectively bury it in "white noise" so to speak. The only problem is the articals length but I can't think of anywhere appropriate to merge it. Wayne 15:47, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

I removed the merge tag due to a lack of consensus and replaced it with a seealso tag. Bry9000 (talk) 04:02, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

This article should indeed be merged with the technical article. This is not really a different sense of the term; it is a metaphoric use of the technical term, understood as "random signal without meaning".
Metaphoric usage of a term normally does not get a separate article, only a brief note in the primary article. Thus one does not have a separate article for "whale used to refer to a fat person", "peanuts used to refer to unimportant things", etc..
A use is metaphorical when speaker and listener understand the metaphor because they know the original meaning. It becomes slang, jargon o rnew language only when its new meaning is no longer dependent on knowledge of the old one, and must be learned (or inferred from the context). This is clearly not the case here: watchers understood Shipman's comment because, and only because, they knew the technical/musical sense.
There is now a sentence in the head section of White noise that notes the metaphorical usage and says everything that this article says, including the references.
All the best, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 05:24, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

You assume too much. Apart from audio/visual technicians and musicians (a small minority of the public), how many people know what white noise actually is? To the general public it is the "snow" on a tv screen if they actually make that connection otherwise it would be inferred from the context. How many people who are interested in the slang meaning will want to read the technical article? Unlike most metaphors, this particular origin article has nothing of interest for the average person. Ten people a day read this article, why should Wikipedia make them waste time reading a boring tech article to find the slang meaning? Wayne (talk) 07:47, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

OK, let me rephrase it: think of a person watching that "Good Morning" show. He will understand the general sense because he knows what "noise" is (and that too is metaphor, not a new sense of the word). What about "white"? Either he has heard the word used in the tecnhical sense (and today many people have, because of its use in music and audio), and understand it too as part of that metaphor; or he hasn't, and will be lost. Perhaps he will guess that it has something to do with race. (Indeed some senses of "white noise" are clearly based on that play of words.)
Fact is that "white noise" in that sense is not "slang term" like, say, "white power", "pork barrel", or "snake oil". Again, to qualify as such it would have to be known and used in that sense by many people who do not know the original sense. One quote and one book title (which is almost certainly metaphoric too) are not enough to say it is.
As for the very few readers who look up "white noise" and are actually looking for the "meaningless drivel" sense: as pages are set up, they will be shown the technical article first. To find this article they would have to (a) read enough of the head section to convince themselves that Shipman did not mean that; (b) click on the link to the disamb page at the top of the article; (c) scan the disamb page trying to guess which sense Shipman intended; (d) click on the "slang" entry. And then they will find out that it was the technical sense after all, used in the metaphorical sense.
All the best, --Jorge Stolfi (talk) 21:29, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Needed Term

The term is reminiscent of hype or more plainly, diversion. Still, in our media age, it seems like the perfect phrase to describe what we all experience. Barkmoss (talk) 22:14, 14 March 2008 (UTC)