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 a...
