Talk:shuffle

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Rfv-sense: (noun) To get lost in the shuffle: to lack attention when you deserve it. Seems confused. Am I missing what the contributor is trying to say. DCDuring TALK 01:28, 18 July 2010 (UTC)Reply

Incomprehensible. Delete. Mglovesfun (talk) 09:08, 18 July 2010 (UTC)Reply

That definition is a little confusing, but I think there's still something in there.

The phrase "lost in the shuffle" seems pretty popular; it means failing to stand out against others.

• 1975 Gil Scott-Heron, "Lost in the Shuffle," Ebony (July 1975), Vol. 30, No. 9, Johnson Publishing Company, p28

  We have allowed ourselves to be "lost in the shuffle" of American priorities in the '70s, but we should never lose sight of ourselves and our goals as our priorities.

• 1987 Robert Subby, Lost in the shuffle: the co-dependent reality, HCI, p39

  We get lost in the shuffle, and in the end we don't even know that we have needs - much less know what these needs might be.

• 1992 Michael G. Kalogerakis, Handbook of psychiatric practice in the juvenile court: the Workgroup on Psychiatric Practice in the Juvenile Court of the American Psychiatric Association, American Psychiatric Pub, p24

  In the occasional highly publicized case, then, the best interests of the child may be lost in the shuffle.

So "shuffle" by itself might be used in the sense of a "a jumbled crowd of people", as below:

• 1996 Kate William, Francine Pascal, In Love with the Enemy, Bantam Books, p18

  Suddenly the girls were caught in a shuffle of people pushing down the aisle.

There might be another unrelated sense, with "shuffle" being the sound of movement (probably closely related to the walking sense), as used here:

• 1967 Betty Schechter, The Dreyfus affair: a national scandal, Gollancz, p207

  There was a rattle of rifles and a shuffle of people rising to their feet and then tense silence as the judges filed into the courtroom and took their places at the central table.

• 1995 Mel Kernahan, White savages in the South Seas, Verso, p113

  As I lay there listening to the strange night sounds, I hear the shuffle of someone creeping by outside in the grass.

• 2003 Edmund G. Bansak & Robert Wise, Fearing the Dark: The Val Lewton Career, McFarland, p394

  She has a crippled leg, and every time she walks we hear the shuffle of her crinoline skirt and the thumping of her cane.

• 2008 Markus Zusak, The Book Thief, Pan Macmillan Australia, p148

  Around her, she could hear the shuffle of her own hands, disturbing the shelves.

Thoughts? Ackatsis 06:45, 25 July 2010 (UTC)Reply

I think the person who originally added the sense did not mean to say that one sense of the noun shuffle is “To get lost in the shuffle: to lack attention when you deserve it”; rather, I think (s)he meant that one term containing the noun shuffle is the phrase “to get lost in the shuffle”, which (s)he defined as “to lack attention when you deserve it”. (This is what's called a "run-in entry"; many or most dictionaries have them, including the French Wiktionary; we tend not to, instead putting such phrases in a "derived terms" section and giving them their own full entries.) —Ruakh_TALK 17:14, 2 October 2010 (UTC)Reply

The challenged sense (a run-in entry) rfv-fails as a sense of "shuffle". I moved the quotations to the citations page, and added "lost in the shuffle" as a derived term. - -sche (discuss) 03:47, 31 July 2011 (UTC)Reply