On Wednesday, January 22, 2003, at 06:46 PM, Mike Johnston wrote:
How odd—doesn't AHED know that American English was declared dead when the plates for Webster's Second Autopsy were released? If those damned liberal lexicographers go around changing accepted usage to reflect actual usage by the people who speak and write the language on a daily basis (subversives, every damned one of them!), American English will never become stable like Latin or any other really good and really dead language. <G>Mike, you need a better dictionary.Definitions 8 & 9 are not positional. "OVER a hundred years " is fine. See definition 3 for LESS.
Ah, yes, well, dictionaries have been going to hell ever since that damned
liberal subversive Webster's Third came out. AHED is actually one of the
better ones, but did you know that the allowable uses of words in AHED were
literally decided upon by committee? No kidding. They convened a usage
panel, and permitted permissive definitions if they happened to be
acceptable to some predetermined percentage of the panel members.
Dan Scott
