You’re probably using the wrong dictionary
James Somers,
Feb 04, 2015
This is a fascinating item looking at the old Websters 1828 dictionary, and the editions that followed in its line. While today's dictionaries publish terse and matter of fact definitions that strip the nuance from the word, the original dictionary was elegant and detailed, presenting the word in all its flavours. "It's as if someone decided that dictionaries these days had to sound like they were written by a Xerox machine, not a person, certainly not a person with a poet's ear, a man capable of high and mighty English, who set out to write the secular American equivalent of the King James Bible and pulled it off." Related: debate on whether the thesaurus has a place in modern information retrieval. Via Longreads.
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