By "the dictionary," I mean, every reputable published dictionary. Every accepted sense recorded in a reputable print dictionary (there are no shortage of these: American Heritage is my favorite) must be acknowledged as a valid sense of a word.
Now, some dictionaries are better than others. I don't care for Webster's, myself - their needless shadings. But I'd have to be a world champ solipsist to stand there and say that one of their definitions - read by millions and printed in ink that may as well be the blood of a forest's worth of trees felled to run off their editions of tens of thousands of bound volumes - was wrong. I am not so self-involved as that. I will not dishonor that sacrifice with my quibbling.
This doesn't mean online dictionaries are disqualified out of hand, but with so much less at stake we have to consider the source a bit more skeptically. Anyone can put a few bits and blips online and make it seem to mean whatever they wish. If an online dictionary comes out of nowhere with a sense that exists only in its own little digital wiki-mind, well...what that let you know?
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By "the dictionary," I mean, every reputable published dictionary. Every accepted sense recorded in a reputable print dictionary (there are no shortage of these: American Heritage is my favorite) must be acknowledged as a valid sense of a word.
Now, some dictionaries are better than others. I don't care for Webster's, myself - their needless shadings. But I'd have to be a world champ solipsist to stand there and say that one of their definitions - read by millions and printed in ink that may as well be the blood of a forest's worth of trees felled to run off their editions of tens of thousands of bound volumes - was wrong. I am not so self-involved as that. I will not dishonor that sacrifice with my quibbling.
This doesn't mean online dictionaries are disqualified out of hand, but with so much less at stake we have to consider the source a bit more skeptically. Anyone can put a few bits and blips online and make it seem to mean whatever they wish. If an online dictionary comes out of nowhere with a sense that exists only in its own little digital wiki-mind, well...what that let you know?
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