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From: callas@eris.DEC (The tea leaves never lie)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Dictionaries
Message-ID: <1033@decwrl.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 10-Mar-85 15:45:54 EST
Article-I.D.: decwrl.1033
Posted: Sun Mar 10 15:45:54 1985
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        Dictionary, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the
        growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This
        dictionary, however, is a most useful work.

        Lexicographer, n. A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of
        recording some particular stage in the development of a language,
        does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility
        and mechanize its methods. For your lexicographer, having written
        this dictionary, comes to be considered "as one having
        authority," whereas his function is only to make a record, not to
        give law. The natural servility of the human understanding having
        invested him with judicial power, surrenders its right of reason
        and submits itself to a chronicle as if it were a statute. Let
        the dictionary (for example) mark a good word as "obsolete" or
        "obsolescent" and few men thereafter venture to use it, whatever
        their need of it and however desirable its restoration to favor
        -- whereby the process of impoverishment is accelerated and
        speech decays. On the contrary, the bold and discerning writer
        who, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation
        if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an
        unfamiliar sense, has no following and is tartly reminded that
        "it isn't in the dictionary" -- although down to the time of the
        first lexicographer (Heaven forgive him!) no author ever had used
        a word that *was* in the dictionary. In the golden prime and high
        noon of English speech; when a Shakespeare and a Bacon were
        possible, and the language now rapidly perishing and one end and
        slowly renewed at the other was in vigorous growth and hardy
        preservation -- sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion --
        the lexicographer was a person unknown, the dictionary a creation
        which his Creator has not created him to create.

                   God said: "Let Spirit perish into Form,"
                   And lexicographers arose, a swarm!
                   Thought fled and left her clothing, which they took,
                   And catalogued each garment in a book.
                   Now, from her leafy covert when she cries:
                   "Give me my clothes and I'll return," they rise
                   And scan the list, and say without compassion:
                   "Excuse us -- they are mostly out of fashion."
                   			Sigismund Smith.

             -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"