Beware of Dictionaries Bearing Definitions

 

In my language pursuits, I have always adhered to a personal rule: look up a word to check its actual meaning, not what I or others believe it to mean. I then went further and consulted the same term in different dictionaries, only to discover—much to my surprise—that meanings shift, definitions fail to concur, and certain words are conspicuous by their absence. Is it “Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance,” as Samuel Johnson put it, or simply a lack of lexicographical gravitas?

I have detected this phenomenon in monolingual dictionaries, both English and Spanish; when it comes to bilingual ones, the disorder becomes far more troubling. Of course, language is elusive and difficult to pin down, and each of us forms an initial impression from which an idea of a word emerges. That is how we ended up with the German Democratic Republic, a totalitarian communist state in which the adjective democratic was little more than a travesty.

Random House Webster’s Dictionary defines democracy as “government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.”

Webster’s New World Dictionary (1970) offers: “Government in which the people hold the ruling power either directly or through elected representatives.”

Collins Dictionary explains that it is “a system of government in which people choose their rulers by voting for them in elections.”

Oxford tells us that democracy is “a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.”

Cambridge defines it as “a system of government in which power is held by elected representatives who are freely voted for by the people.”

The definitions are close, certainly—but in my view, none of them quite earns a cigar. They describe mechanisms, not outcomes; procedures, not power.

More on David Hume’s impressions and ideas as applied to language in a later post.