Talk:Anoia

I am just feeling curious... is the meaning of "rattle the drawer" as written here clear to everybody? My first language is not English and when I read the book I spent a few minutes trying to figure out why the action was called rattling. It was also the first time that I found out that the situation could be described as "stick" (the meanings I had been aware of before this was "stick" as "glue it to" or in the same way as "stick it where the sun don't shine"). I propose that the sentence be modified to: 'When a drawer cannot open because of some object inside it sticking in the way, someone shakes and unsuccessfully pulls the drawer making a rattling sound, and cries "How can it close on the damned thing but not open with it? Who bought this? Do we ever use it?", even though the person might be genuinely irritated or even exasperated, it is a praise unto Anoia.' We are a wiki, so we ought to make things clear and understandable even to little kiddies. Improvements to this proposal are welcome. Current version is left intact for purposes of comparison. --Vsl 02:17, 27 January 2006 (CET)

I disagree. I did understand "rattling", and for those who don't, there's the dictionary. Little kiddies will probably understand as the only little kiddies likely to read this will have English as their first language. --Sanity 10:23, 27 January 2006 (CET)

All the English dictionaries I have here in America (English-English, not a translation dictionary) emphasize "rattle" as having the purpose of making the sound, so it was confusing... --Vsl 15:25, 27 January 2006 (CET)

Well, that's what happens. Trying to open a stuck drawer makes a rattling sound. It immediately gave me the impression of someone trying to open a drawer where something got stuck. I think the word was purposely chosen for audiovisual writing effect. But explaining the expression makes it look a bit silly. Besides, people can now watch this talk page if they don't understand. --Sanity 16:30, 27 January 2006 (CET)

To throw in a second (well, third) opinion - I have no trouble understanding "rattle" either. And my native tongue isn't english. It's german, though, and we have a similar word, "rattern", so perhaps that's why...--Cyberman 23:00, 10 September 2010 (CEST)

And to add in a poisson rouge, the word "rattling" can also be used as a colloquial verb, as in "he was rattling around in the big house" or "he rattled round the corner". Sorry about that, but considering English has the largest collection of words in its vocabulary of any language we have an irritating habit of ascribing 2,3 or 4 meanings to many many words as if we had a paucity of them.--Knmatt 10:15, 11 September 2010 (CEST)