Every dictionary should carry a health warning. They should place on their cover or home page the following statement:
"Important notice! This is a historical record of what people meant when they used these words in the past. This dictionary should not be used as a guaranteed indication of what they mean when they use the same words in the present, or what they will mean when they use them in the future." In other words, a dictionary records how people used a particular word in the past—not (necessarily) how they intend to use the same word today. We all know how quickly the meaning of words can change. Even if the American and British governments got together and passed laws that bound us to use a single, common, standardised word for the section of a thoroughfare that pedestrians walk on, or which part of a car contains the engine, there would still be perfectly valid reasons for Merriam-Wester and Oxford to carry on publishing their records of what American English and British English users called these items in the past. That's point one. The second reason is that both flavours of English reflect different evolutionary influences. However common the tongue shared by English-speaking settlers of the New World as they stepped off British soil for the last time, their use of it began changing the second their feet touched the timbers of the vessels destined to take them there. Their ears would hear different accents and usages, different languages, too, and they would have started to reflect this in their own speech, writing and—before long—thinking. Just as the friends and family members they had left behind would have followed a similar process back in their home hamlet, village, town or city; and albeit at a different pace and subject to different cultural, social, economic, technological and spiritual influences. Dictionaries are a means of recording such processes, so that they can be studies, researched, understood, interpreted or just simply enjoyed for what they reveal about the richness and diversity of language. They're certainly a useful guide to what words mean, and even to how they are spelled and used, but nothing in a dictionary is "set in stone", other than historically. Take, for example, the often-quoted (and attributed to George Bernard Shaw) observation that Britain and America are "two countries divided by a common language". It's thanks to the existence of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations that we can learn that nowhere in George Bernard Shaw's writing do those words appear. Rather, they're a riff on lines from Oscar Wilde's 1887 play, The Canterville Ghost: "We have everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, the language". -- -- Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum * Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/ * It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls. * Read the latest breaking news, and more. --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "PoliticalForum" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
