DICTIONARIES BY THE WORKING MAN



I know of Urban Dictionary in English, a travesty of lexicography. Penned by linguistically ignorant native speakers, the result is a jumble of nonsense: ill-conceived definitions, riddled with errors in grammar and spelling, where solecisms abound. It would be acceptable as a source of laughter and merriment, but indeed not of credible and serious word information. I have recently discovered that Spanish has a sort of counterpart to the Urban: "Diccionario abierto y colaborativo." All the above apply to this dictionary. Looking for a bona fide equivalent to the English expression: "not to be the sharpest pencil (crayon, knife) in the box," I stumbled upon this in the Diccionario abierto: "No ser el lápiz más afilado del estuche. Dícese de una ingeniosa [¿?] expresión colloquial y de cariz cómica [sic], que ha sido popularizada en las redes sociales, en la que se refiere sobre [sic] una persona que bien no es muy inteligente o bien le falta agudeza mental." The expression is not witty but a simple copy from English and, of course, "cariz" is a masculine noun ("de cariz cómico"). We are not informed who is behind this "Diccionario abierto y popular donde todo vale." These "popular and democratic contributions to learning, "open to all" remind me of those books or dictionaries that interpret our dreams, and explain the arcane meanings of dreaming about "garlic", or "a visitor" or "the dead" and guessing the future, with absurd information. 

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