Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Cue sports

 ***** DRAFT ARTICLE *****

I need to look into a) etymology of words now considered simple words but once compounds ("today", etc.); and b) the handling of symbolic-reference pseudo-prefixes; and various other things. IDEAS WELCOME!

This is a draft submission for the nine-ball talk page, though I am now thinking it should ultimately end up being something like "[[Wikipedia:[something:]Billiards/Spelling guidelines]]"

Anyway, help me think this through. The point is not for me to become world famous™ for having finally codified billiards terms and united the entire English-speaking world in using them. I simply want the articles here on pool to be very consistent in application of consensus Wikipedia editing standards about spelling/phrasing of confusable billards terms that may be ambiguous to many readers in the absence of that standard ("While nine-ball is a nine ball game, the 9 ball is the real target; pocket it in a nine ball or shorter run if you have to, but earlier is better.") That's the super-simple "use case" I can make for my proposed nomenclature. If you think that differentiation didn't cut it TELL ME, and say how you would improve it.

So, here's the article draft so far (it remains phrased as a major Talk page item, and would be rewritten for becoming a Wikipedia: namespace article):

Consensus and consistency needed on spelling to prevent ambiguity & confusion

Especially for nine-ball but also for eight-ball, five-pins, etc., I firmly think we need to come to, and as editors enforce in article texts, a consensus on spelling and implement it consistently throughout this and related articles. I advocate (and herein attempt to justify) the following standardized spellings:

Summary

• nine-ball = the game and only the game — hyphenation mandatory, numeral forbidden, capitalization forbidden (except as "Nine-ball" at sentence beginning.
• the 9 ball = the ball and only the ball — hyphenation forbidden (including grammatically optional hyphenation of adjective phrase as in "nice 9 ball shot"), numeral mandatory (exception "Nine (9) ball" at sentence beginning deprecated). The definite article is generally mandatory.
• nine ball = adjective phrase referring to number of balls, as in "a nice nine ball run" — grammatically optional hypenation forbidden, numeral forbidden.
• ninth ball = phrase referring to order of balls — hyphenation generally not relevant, numeral forbidden
• nine games = phrase refering to something other than balls; hyphenation generally not relevant, numeral forbidden (with very limited exceptions, e.g. "the carom billiards game 18.2 balkline")
• 9-ball = forbidden, except in article intro sentence as a colloquial alternate spelling (and even then only if applicable as per details below).

The game

• The canonical name of the game [in English], for Wikipedia purposes, is "nine-ball". The correct names of the game, outside the Wikipedia context, are (and grammatically must be) "nine-ball" or "9-ball", but we eschew "9-ball" on Wikipedia as a name of the game to avoid confusion, as explained below. It is not "Nine-ball" - games are not proper nouns (cf. football, badminton, chess, etc.) It is certainly not "Nine-Ball" - second and subsequent word parts are not capitalized in hyphenated compounds, even if the compounds are proper nouns, unless also proper names, publication titles or the like (e.g. "Jane Foster-Smythe"). The game also is not named "nine ball" [nor "Nine Ball" for reasons given above]. Why? Because: First, sport/game names that end in "ball" are almost universally compounded in English^[A] And cf. the more similarly-named bowling games of nine-pins and ten-pins, which are traditionally both spelled out and hyphenated.^[B]. Second, the adjective has fused to the noun to form a compound noun - without the adjective being integrated into the noun, it is simply a random noun modified by a random adjective like "hot soup" or "ugly dog", and the results are nonsensical in the context of what nine-ball actually is (a thing named, cohesive, integral and indivisible; not a thing described) - one cannot reasonably say "we were playing a game of ball, the nine kind" in reference to this game [unless related to Yoda one is perhaps, hmm?]; "nine-ball" is a concept an sich, and ergo it is necessarily a compound noun^[C]. And third, perhaps most importantly, if it is not compounded and the adjective remains unbound to the noun, it is free to modify entire noun phrases that follow it or to be distanced from the noun by insertions, with confusing and ambiguous results - an example within an earlier version of the nine-ball article itself demonstrated this ambiguity: "nine ball rules", which could just as easily mean "nine rules about balls" or "rules about nine balls"; other words than "rules", such as "game(s)" cause similar ambiguities. If we have just "nine ball rules" instead of the inseparable "nine-ball rules", we can also have "nine confusing ball rules"; note that we cannot have "nine-confusing-ball rules" without there being an identifiable, unified thing called "nine-confusing-ball" [which one supposes might be a future game with balls technologically able to randomly change their color and symbols on the fly!] Compounding the noun to its erstwhile adjective prevents any insertions (or more to the point, signals that such insertion isn't even possible; the phrase is immediately and naturally parsed as a compound noun.

• The term "9-ball" is an acceptable short version in any context except the billiards-related Wikipedia articles. Rationale: Indeed, the "9-ball" spelling is conceptually perhaps even more correct than "nine-ball" (for symbol vs. number-per-se reasons that become clear below), but firstly, it will be too difficult and awkward to restructure the large number of sentences that naturally should begin with this phrase just to avoid ungrammatically starting sentences with numerals instead of capital letters; and, far more seriously, it will remain hard to read and understand these articles if the usage is not just logically sound but also visually distinct, and this distinction is consistently maintained. The one time 9-ball can be used in Wikipedia billiards articles is in the first sentence of the article about that game, as an alternative colloquial name, e.g.:

Nine-ball (colloquially also "9-ball") is a pocket billiards game [...]

The ball

• The ball itself is, and must be, "the 9 ball", in all cases. It cannot logically be "the 9-ball", because it is not a compound noun, but simply a noun modified by an identifying adjective, like "my shoe" or "Wheeler's Peak" - unlike the game of nine-ball, the 9 ball really is just a thing with a (symbolic in this case) descriptor that differentiates it from several other similar things (balls) within the same context (the pool table at hand). "The 9 ball" is simply short for "the number 9 ball"; that phrase could technically be hyphenated, as "the number-9 ball", but we see clearly that it is an adjectival phrase modifying a simple noun; it is not a compound noun — one would not write "the number-9-ball" or "the number 9-ball" so we cannot logically write "the 9-ball" either. Similarly if we had a custom pool ball set with different symbols we might refer to the "ankh ball" and the "mu ball", and there is no reason to hyphenate such phrases. Indeed, doing so can lead to more confusion that it solves (e.g. "the +-terminal and --terminal on the battery"!) As with the game itself, it is not a proper noun, like the title of a book, so "the 9 Ball" is out of the question. It is also not "the nine ball" - it does not say "nine" on it, and the numeral it bears is not really a number per se, but simply a symbol.^[D] This does mean that it would not be grammatical to begin a sentence with a bare reference to the 9 ball, without an article or other preceding word; but, oh well - we have the same problem with the poet e.e. cummings, yet the field of literary criticism has simply dealt with it (almost universally respecting his wishes to remain all-lower-case), and somehow survived unscathed. It is hard to think of such a sentence in the first place. Perhaps something like "9 ball shots are the most often missed in nine-ball due to what is colloquially known as 'choking'." Which sounds kind of funny anyway because it is ambiguous and silly ("9 shots on a specific ball? 9 shots on any balls? Huh?"); Most people would write "The 9 ball shot is the most often missed..." If one insists on begin a sentence with "Nine" in reference to the ball itself, it must, in Wikipedia billiards articles, be rendered as "Nine (9) ball..." to prevent ambiguity (especially for non-native English speakers; few languages are as cavalier and confusing about operator overloading of number usage as is English.) And of course it can't be "the 9 Ball" or "the 9-Ball" (capitalized) for reasons already discussed.

• An acceptable informal short version is "the 9". It is not "the nine" (nor "the Nine"; see above^[E]). Again, this ball is not labelled "nine" (except perhaps on some custom-designed balls somewhere), but "9". NB: It would never, except at the beginning of a sentence, in a book title, etc, be "The 9" with a capital "T".

• The "the" is mandatory, except where the indefinite article, a more specfic reference, or a clause providing such, precedes "9". Examples, respectively: "a 9 ball shot", "that 9 ball opportunity", "first shoot the 7 ball, then the 8 and 9" (emphasis added for clarity).

• Grammatically optional hyphenation when used as adjective phrase is not used in Wikipedia articles on billiards. While many would normally prefer to write "a 9-ball shot" it must be written "a 9 ball shot", for disambiguation reasons.

Other

• References to the count of or succession of balls should always be in the form "nine balls", "ninth ball", etc. To avoid confusion, they should be spelled out (no numerals like "9 balls left", "or sank his 9th ball in a row in the straight pool match") — it's standard English usage to spell it out anyway — and not hyphenated, either.

• Optional hyphenating of number-mentioning compound adjectives should be studiously avoided in the context of billiards-related articles on Wikipedia. For obvious reasons of ambiguity and ensuing confusion, even if one's dialect or preferred register normally calls for it, one should not write, "She pulled off an astounding nine-ball run in bank pool." A previous example could optionally have read "The 9-ball shot is the most often missed...", but the visually confusing ambiguity of this style is immediately evident.

• The convention on naming of the game shall apply, in its entirety, to games named for the winning ball. This holds regardless of whether this coincides with total number of object balls (as seven "seven-ball"), or not (e.g. "eight-ball", which is played with seven striped and seven solid object balls, plus the money ball and the cueball.)

• The convention on naming of the game shall apply, sans the one-time usage of the "9-ball" format in the first sentence as an alternative spelling, to games named for the number of objects used in the game. This holds regardless of whether the objects are object balls ("three-ball", "fifteen-ball"), total balls ("three-ball billiards") or non-ball objects ("five-pins"), and regardless of whether or Such as three-ball, and five-pins [should the five-pins article ever be written; it doesn't exist yet, despite the game being the most popular form of billiards in Italy and parts of South America.] Usage of such appellations as "3-ball", "5-pins", etc. for such games is grammatically unsound and simply lazy; Wikipedia should not encourage such usages as valid alternate spellings, though #REDIRECT pages should silently take people to the correct article if they use these spellings.

• The convention on naming of numbered balls (e.g. "the 9 ball") shall apply to all games.

• The convention on refering to the count or sequence of balls shall also apply to non-ball objects, whether numbered or not. For example, pins/skittles or shake bottle pills/peas. E.g. "I knocked over all five pins" not "...all 5 pins"; "I drew the number five pill", not "...5 pill". While "...5 pill" would be correct under the same theory as "the 9 ball", in the Wikipedia context, the similarity of the former to the latter will be visually confusing to readers (and editors) &mdash. Let numerals in these articles always refer to numbered balls, except where numeric usage is utterly ingrained (e.g. "18.2 balkline", "14.1 continuous").

• Spelling flames and correction flames condemned: Divergence from this [draft] consensus standard in an article by an editor should simply be corrected without remonstrance or criticism. Non-standard usage in talk pages should be completely tolerated, with no criticism and especially no edits of others' posts, just as with any other typo or spelling/usage preference or quirk (cf. WP:EQ). This [draft] consensus standard is for the rendering of article text only, and though hopefully it would influence and clarify usage elsewhere, it is not intended to have any applicability as a standard elsewhere, within or without Wikipedia. And it is expressly not expected that the average, occasional editor of these articles will or should memorize this standard, only that clean-up editors who have done so and who enforce it will not be attacked for it nor have their clean-up edits reverted.

Footnotes

1. Admittedly most are not hypenated today [which used to be spelled "to-day"], with "stick-ball" being a common optional exception; but in their early days these games were univerally referred to as "foot-ball", "base-ball", etc., and the particularly old ones were originally written as two words, before the "-ball" convention evolved. Cf. also "e-mail" ↠ "email", etc. — compounding and the eventual dehyphenization of compounds, to form new unified words, are very common processes in English. But contrast these compounded sports names with "ice hockey" and "field hockey", or "long jump" and "high jump", etc.; in references to games and pastimes, this compounding phenomenon is mostly peculiar to "ball" and "skat[e|ing]" sports and games, and a few othres, and those inspired by them, e.g. "snowboarding" from "skateboarding". One day we will surely play nineball (or OMG, 9ball, LOL <sigh>), but this is not anywhere close to a standard usage yet (a non-exhaustive scan of a dozen books on pool, and a small stack of Billiards Digest and other pool mags, revealed no occurrences of the "9ball" spelling and only a handful of "nineball" instances). [back]
2. Note also that for "number-named" games the names of which refer purely to the number of balls being used, such as "eight-ball", "three-ball billiards" and "fifteen-ball", the name is both an in-and-of-itself a compound noun by being a reference to a game an sich and it is a compound adjective, making the hyphen even more apropos. Since only someone who already knows perhaps more about a given game than they would learn from reading the article about it is likely to know whether or not the game in question is named for its money ball or its number of balls, the consistent use of game name in the hyphenated format "nine-ball" is doubly indicated; applying a standard of "nine ball" name formatting to some games and "nine-ball" to others, based on this distinction, would be even more confusing than the overall usage before this Wikipedia standard was drafted! [back]
3. This is a common feature of English; e.g.: "I did a Wikipedia look-up on 'billiards' last night" - it was not an upward glance, even metaphorically, but a "look-up", which despite its etymology has a distinct synergistic meaning as a compound noun that differs greatly from the simple sum of its two parts. Indeed, a game based on the non-synergistic concept "9 ball" (no hyphen) would be pretty boring, what with only one ball to shoot at! [back]
4. Cf. "X-ray" - though we prounounce it "ecks-ray" we never spell it that way, and it is only very infrequently misspelled "x-ray" in scientific literature, because scientists know that "X" is a symbol not a letter of the alphabet as such, in this context. X-rays are not one type of ray in a series ranging from "a" through "z"; rather, the X is an arbirary, symbolic designation. Just like the numbers (which could just as easily have been letters or Egyptian hieroglyphs) on pool balls. The numbers were added simply to tell the balls apart specifically rather than just by "suit" (as still evidenced even today by the fact that the British, among others, do not regularly call shots, and thus do not typically use numbered object balls, other than the adopted 8 ball). Obviously nine-ball and other more obscure numerical rotation games were invented to take advantage of the already existing numbers (It would be absurd to posit that such games existed before numbered balls but with no one actually playing them until unfulfilled demand resulted in numbering being added to balls!) So, they are symbols. We do not spell out symbols, unless those symbols do not exist in our character set (e.g. the Artist Formerly Known as Prince's symbol) or would not be understood by the target audience (e.g. we write "mu" if the reader cannot be expected to recognize the actual Greek letter). Neither condition applies to "9" of course. Note that "X-ray", aside from being capitalized as a symbol, and The X-Files (which is further capitalized as a title), are both hyphenated as compound nouns, because these two cases — unlike "the 9 ball", but very much like the game of "nine-ball" — refer to unique things named as discrete entities unto themselves, not near-identical things described and differentiated from their neighbors. That is, if the show had been about actual case names filed alphabetically under "X", like "Xavier, James A.", the show would have been called The X Files, and references to the files themselves would be rendered "the X files" with a lower case "f" (and, further, could have correctly been referred to as "the x files" had the show centered on someone obsessed with keeping files about non-proper-noun dictionary words.) [back]
5. And besides, "the Nine" means something else entirely to anyone who's read "The Lord of the Rings"! [back]

Process

I would like to propose that this standard be adopted as a consensus agreement by the regular editors and "clean-up crew" on this and related articles. As it stands today, the aritcle is somewhat hard to read and tedious to parse even for someone who is a native English speaker and avid pool player. I feel very sorry for those who do not yet know anything about the game of nine-ball, and/or are ESL learners. Heh.

PS: Though eight-ball is the most popular pool game, nine-ball is the most serious/professional/standardized, so that's why I posted this here. I would like to see consensus (not just a "you're out-voted!" but a genuine understanding of the reasoning behind whatever standard emerges (the one I've proposed or an alternative), and at least tacit acceptance of its necessity even by those that may disagree on a specific small point. If consensus is reached I would clean this up even more (it's alread formatted pretty heavily, but has too many asides and first-person in it) and make a Wikipedia: namespace page out of it.

— SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 13:47, 17 July 2006 (UTC)