Talk:Elderly Sensei

I just added this line to the start of the trope description:

The Other Wiki tells us that "In art history, "Old Master" (or "old master") refers to any painter of skill who worked in Europe before about 1800, or a painting by such an artist." Well, This Is Not That Trope.

Does anybody have a better name for this trope that doesn't conflict with the Real Life meaning of the phrase? One of ATT's goals is to be a reference work, and using Real Life terms in ways that don't match their Real Life meanings dillutes that goal.

No, I don't have a suggestion for a new name.

@Agiletek @GentlemensDame883 @HeneryVII @Ilikecomputers @Jlaw @Lequinni‎ @RivetVermin @Umbire the Phantom @Utini501 @Labster @Looney Toons @GethN7 @Robkelk @QuestionableSanity @Derivative @SelfCloak

"Elderly Expert" immediately came to mind as a new name, but I'm also willing to hear out other suggestions.

That's a toughie. How about Elderly Sensei?

I wouldn't agree with such a move. "Old Master" as it currently stands is a very efficient and precise term. It's just three syllables and yet is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Pretty much any proposed replacement would be clunkier and less neat.

I know the Wikipedia connectivity can be useful a lot of times, but I think this is one of the times we shouldn't give ground just for the sake of not stepping on its toes.

and yet is Exactly What It Says on the Tin

Unless they lived before the 20th century or earlier and painted pictures, it isn't Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Merriam-Webster definition of Old Master]

Calling somebody who isn't an artist an Old Master is like calling somebody who isn't a three-member rock band a Power Trio. We've fixed one of those already.

Not changing the term to match what it really means is staying wrong for the sake of following TV Tropes' lead.

Really? The trope's about someone who's 1. old 2. a master. Simple as. If you just asked folks what they thought "old master" meant, without appealing to the dictionary for such specialised knowledge, how many do you seriously think are going to come up with this super-specific definition for a generic and obvious phrase? It's not TVT that I'm looking to.

Sorry but no thanks, bro. This is a hill I'll die on.

Considering what the top DuckDuckGo results are, I'm pretty sure that most people think Old Masters are pre-20th-centrry artists.

You're preparing to die on a hill of Small Reference Pools.

Yes, it should be renamed, and I like Henery's suggestion -- "Elderly Sensei" or "Ancient Sensei" would work just fine.

Another thing that needs changing: The line "Break out the ^ sign on your calculator" at the start of the third paragraph. What? Is this a reference to TVT's refnote markup? I have no idea. Whether it is or isn't, it doesn't really belong.

Oh, and the main text seems to revolve around physical combat, but the page quote is about a wizard. Maybe generalize the description a bit?

That's the operator symbol for exponentiation. Do you not do maths on a computer??

I've been a programmer for forty years. I know that it's a mathematical operator. As far as I'm concerned, there's nothing in

Break out the ^ sign on your calculator when this trope is applied to seasoned adventurers of any type; anyone who's managed to survive to a ripe old age while performing inherently dangerous work is obviously really damned good at it.

that makes any (more) sense when you consider it a math function.

As a professional writer, I think of the caret as an indicator that somebody forgot to include some words in a sentence, and thesaurus.com spends more time on this definition than it does on the mathematical definition.

Yes, that, too. Thinking more on this, it seems obvious to me that someone back on TVT was trying to be clever, and fumbled his skill roll. I'll probably rewrite the passage to be a bit more comprehensible sometime in the near future.

I like how Ancient Sensei rolls off the tongue, same with Elderly Sensei. I could go with either one, though I think Elderly just barely edges out Ancient since I tend to associate that word with truly ancient things (as in hundreds, if not thousands of years old) if that makes any sense.

It looks to me like we have consensus - not unanimity, just consensus - on a rename. It also looks to me that "Elderly Sensei" is the favoured new name.

So... changing the page name to Elderly Sensei.