The Right Dictionary
James Somers (via Gabe Weatherhead):
I could go on forever listing examples. I could say, “Look up example, magic, sport. Look up arduous, huge, chauvinistic, venal, pell-mell, raiment, sue, smarting, stereotype. Look up the word word, and look, and up. Look up every word you used today.” Indeed that’s what motivated this post: I’d been using Webster’s dictionary for about a year; I kept looking words up, first there, then in whatever modern dictionary was closest to hand, and seeing this awful difference, evidence of a crime that kept piling up in my mind, the guilt building: so many people were getting this wrong impression about words, every day, so many times a day.
There’s an amazing thing that happens when you start using the right dictionary. Knowing that it’s there for you, you start looking up more words, including words you already know. And you develop an affection for even those, the plainest most everyday words, because you see them treated with the same respect awarded to the rare ones, the high-sounding ones.
[…]
Note that the modern Merriam-Webster, even though it does derive directly from Webster’s original, has been revised so much that it’s actually less similar, content-wise, than some of the impostors. It, too, is one of the “wrong” dictionaries.
He has a tip for how to get the Mac OS X dictionary app to use Webster’s 1913 dictionary instead of Oxford.
Update (2014-07-23): Brent Simmons:
(Byron. Wow. I like a metaphor like that because you learn something about both sides, about the Almighty and tempests both.)
This is after two minutes of clicking around. There’s an entire language of rewards in there.
