Dictionaries prove nothing

created by futurebird

(idea) by futurebird (2.2 y) (print) ? 1 C! Fri May 11 2001 at 17:40:18

Running to the dictionary to prove your point is a slavish adherence to some pseudoacademic notion of how a word should be used. The more people who use a word in a new way (like the word 'bad' to mean 'damn good') the more that word comes to have the new meaning.

Take words like "jew", "woman" or "black" for example, the top down dictionary definitions of these words c. 1950 were intended to perpetuate the social norms of that that day. Since then many people have decided that those norms are incorrect, and we have new norms. We may yet discover that the definitions we use, even now, are wrong. I see the use of the dictionary as a source of truth ie. "this word always means this" as a potential road block to social change.

Dictionaries are about the top down control of language, which makes no sense since language is developed from the bottom up (in most cases). Dictionaries should just be used to look up words that you don't know-- not to try to `prove' that a word means one thing or another.

Google spell check	The two essential phrases to learn in other languages	prescriptive grammar	What do you call a person who speaks three languages?
Revolution vs. Civil War	Apostrophe Abuse	The Number of Languages you know is the Number of Times you are Human	irregardless
The foreign language false coolness factor	proving non-existence	The Book of the Damned: Chapter 1	Languages in which whitespace is significant
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Synonyms	Jew	Black	May 10, 2000
Dream Log: May 10, 2001	Peruvian slang	The Language Police	Official Languages Act
hockey	Spider-Man	woman	academia

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