[HN Gopher] Using the Wrong Dictionary (2014)
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Using the Wrong Dictionary (2014)
Author : hdk
Score : 77 points
Date : 2023-09-03 07:44 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jsomers.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (jsomers.net)
| macintux wrote:
| Similarly, using a true Roget's Thesaurus is liberating. Grouping
| words ontologically instead of alphabetically adds a layer of
| indirection, but as we know from computer science, just one layer
| of indirection can make all the difference in the world.
| layer8 wrote:
| WordHippo also does this: https://www.wordhippo.com/what-
| is/another-word-for/example.h...
| macintux wrote:
| Thanks for the tip. Visual Thesaurus also.
|
| https://www.visualthesaurus.com/
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The 1913 Webster is among the standard dictionaries included with
| the gcide dictionary, accessible via dictd (and the dict command)
| on Debian (and derived distros: Ubuntu, Mint, etc.). This
| provides terminal-mode access to word definitions.
|
| You can specify which dictionary you want to use with the '-d'
| option, or write an alias or bash function to invoke gcide
| directly, e.g., dgcide () { dict -d gcide "$*" |
| ${PAGER:-less}; }
|
| Another favourite dictionary is the Online Etymological
| Dictionary, which shows word _origins_ (not necessarily the
| _present day_ meaning, but often informing it.
|
| <https://www.etymonline.com/>
|
| That's also possible to query from a terminal via:
| etym () { w3m "https://www.etymonline.com/word/$1"; }
|
| (w3m is a highly-useful, vi-keybindings-based, terminal-mode Web
| browser: <https://w3m.sourceforge.net/>).
| mhb wrote:
| Previous:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Using%20the%20Wrong%20Dictiona...
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| To be specific:
|
| - 2014 (635pts, 139 comments):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7772557
|
| - 2019 (291pts, 87 comments):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19763435
|
| - 2021 (231pts, 173 comments):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734242
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _You're probably using the wrong dictionary (2014)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35635876 - April 2023 (1
| comment)
|
| _You 're probably using the wrong dictionary_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31776500 - June 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Using the wrong dictionary (2014)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734242 - Dec 2021 (170
| comments)
|
| _You're probably using the wrong dictionary (2014)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19763435 - April 2019
| (87 comments)
|
| _You 're probably using the wrong dictionary_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9294518 - March 2015 (2
| comments)
|
| _Using the wrong dictionary_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7772557 - May 2014 (138
| comments)
|
| _You're probably using the wrong dictionary_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7765006 - May 2014 (1
| comment)
| dmvdoug wrote:
| The critique of dictionaries made by "teams" of people, as
| against a single person, is odd. Like the writer expects
| lexicography to be just an art form where word lovers can explore
| and display their idiolects or something.
|
| If a dictionary is supposed to state the meanings of words as
| those words are used, you have to go out and look at how they're
| used, not toil in isolation at your desk, tracing in your mind
| the lines of force emanating from words. Going out and looking
| means lexicography is something of an observational science
| (N.B.: "something of").
|
| Yes, it's delightful to plumb the depths of something like the
| OED. But obsolete or antiquated meanings of words are not
| necessarily somehow latent in the words as used presently.
| Language changes; meanings change.
|
| You see the same issue more often with etymologies. Some people
| seem to think that etymology necessarily sheds light on how the
| word is used today. Like you're supposed to go "ah-ha!" when
| someone shows you the meanings of root words or something.
| Etymology, too, is delightful to play with, but it, too, has a
| more rigorous face. But thinking you've discovered something deep
| about the _present use_ of a word because you've run across a
| peculiar or otherwise interesting etymology just reveals a basic
| misunderstanding of what an etymology is for.
|
| All that said, as a somewhat hyperverbal person myself, I
| completely understand and appreciate the real delight you can
| experience in word exploration and wordplay. So I throw no shade
| at it. But the idea that "you are using the wrong dictionary" or
| even "using the dictionary wrong" because you are looking for the
| basic descriptive fact(s) about word usage in the present is
| asinine. From it wafts the odor of one who spends too much time
| smelling their own farts.
| Kamq wrote:
| > But obsolete or antiquated meanings of words are not
| necessarily somehow latent in the words as used presently.
| Language changes; meanings change.
|
| I think you're ignoring that, if enough of us do this, they can
| also change back.
| dmvdoug wrote:
| Nah, that's just not how language tends to evolve, except
| perhaps for specialized vocabularies that are created to
| denote specific, technical things for the purpose of
| agreement among those involved.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _evolve_
|
| Develop.
|
| Awareness, as I mentioned nearby, we could say is required
| for language to "evolve". Out of entropy, a natural
| occurrence, language can devolve.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _Some people seem to think that etymology necessarily sheds
| light on how the word is used today_
|
| More precisely, we think that an etymological analysis is
| needed to shed light on why the word is used in some ways
| today, and to basically reveal its core ideal meaning that
| allows (or contributes explaining) its uses.
|
| It's awareness.
|
| You have your tools, you should know them adequately well.
| Language is worth special attention.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Using the Webster 1913 on Mac OS as the default dictionary,
| previously discussed on HN at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29733648
| gautamcgoel wrote:
| I actually bought this dictionary on the basis of this blog post.
| (You can find reprints from Christian schooling websites, who
| want to preserve proper "biblical" English as it was taught
| centuries ago.) The dictionary is great, but it doesn't have the
| same definitions as in the article. For example 'sport' is not
| defined as 'a diversion of the field'. YMMV.
| nwatson wrote:
| For a comedic take on dictionaries, see Rowan Atkinson and other
| great actors in the episode "Ink and Incapability", where Black
| Adder takes on Samuel Johnson and his first dictionary of the
| English language.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| The article reads as though he has never heard of, much less read
| any part of, the OED or "A New English Dictionary on Historical
| Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The
| Philological Society".
| cjs_ac wrote:
| American culture is remarkably solipsistic. We see and know so
| much of them, and they see and know so little of us (for any
| given 'us').
|
| (Four years after moving from Australia to the UK, my twenty-
| volume print copy of the OED remains in storage in Australia,
| waiting for international freight rates to fall. Oh how I miss
| it.)
| pm215 wrote:
| In the meantime, if you're a member of your local UK library
| you probably have free access to the online OED using your
| library card number.
| rf15 wrote:
| You can extend this to the whole of "the west". In fact, you
| even have this effect between west german and east german
| culture.
| gwright wrote:
| Any reason not to extend that to all cultures? There is a
| limitation to the bandwidth any one community (including
| the smallest community, yourself) has to the "outside".
| Mass media and the Internet has certainly reduced the
| latency between cultures/communities but has not eliminated
| it.
|
| I'm sure I'm not the only person to have thought about how
| cultural differences are sustained over time on the account
| of synchronization challenges due to bandwidth limitations
| between cultures (language, frequency, latency).
| barkingcat wrote:
| After reading the first few paragraphs, I searched for the
| letters OED in the story and it does not appear.
|
| To be honest, urban dictionary does everything this author
| wanted. Any 18 year old and up knows that if you want the right
| insult (or the right descriptor to a sex act you want to
| propose) you gotta use the right vernacular.
| dmckeon wrote:
| The American Heritage dictionary deserves a mention, not only for
| its extensive usage panels of writers, but for its practice of
| putting the most current meanings first, so that the dread
| "Webster's defines X as..." is not followed by some antique
| meaning from the 1700s, but by a current meaning. The OED has no
| equal, of course, but for a dictionary that one can lift with one
| hand and read without a magnifier, the AHD is a high value tool.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| Sadly, the usage panel is no more, and maintenance of the
| ahdictionary.com web site apparently reduced to a skeleton
| crew:
|
| https://mypointbeing.com/2020/12/14/the-end-of-the-road-for-...
|
| I recall a blog post from one of the (former) members of the
| usage panel, but DDG isn't finding it for me now. Surely more
| than one of the former panelists have blogged about it --
| anyone have links?
|
| It's a telling comment on corporate priorities of our time that
| there's funding for keeping up with social "sensitivity
| issues", but not for dropping references to the non-existent
| panel from the main website. Indeed, some of those listed as
| active members have already set down their pen for the last
| time: Harold Bloom, Joan Didion.
|
| https://ahdictionary.com/word/usagepanel.html
| two_handfuls wrote:
| It may be about the wrong dictionary, but this is very much the
| right kind of writing.
| ralferoo wrote:
| I find it's actually interesting when learning a foreign language
| that I usually discover more about English in the process.
|
| The problem with many dictionaries is that they often try to be
| too reductionist, as with some of the examples in the article,
| but with other languages it's interesting because you quickly
| realise that words don't have a one-to-one mapping but instead
| words are usually overloaded with multiple meanings, sometimes
| related, and over languages will have words that overlap in
| different ways.
|
| Sticking just with English for now, consider "interest" - it can
| mean a desire to know more about something, a pastime, the money
| earned when lending money to someone else, a stake in a company,
| and other meanings besides these. Some of these meanings have
| other words that describe them, e.g. a pastime is also called a
| hobby, and some of them have other meanings, e.g. a stake could
| be something in the ground.
|
| Taking a mathematical view for a moment, if you start thinking
| about the richness of these words and their meanings, you could
| almost imagine having dots to represent concepts and words being
| like a Venn diagram that encompass some of these dots and not
| other, and have overlaps with other words. You can consider a
| thesaurus as a book that lists out all these overlapping areas,
| which are not necessarily transitive across overlaps - e.g. stake
| can never mean hobby.
|
| If you consider Romance languages, you'll find that English often
| compresses multiple meanings into one that are distinct in other
| languages - e.g. "free" is "without payment" or "without
| restrictions". Many languages split up the ideas in "to know",
| for instance to know information, to know a person, to recognise
| something, to understand something, etc. In other cases, English
| has several words for similar concepts where other languages have
| one word for all the concepts - e.g. English words for meat are
| generally Germanic origin for the animal, and French origin for
| the food you eat, such as cow/beef, pig/ham, sheep/lamb, etc.
|
| I've been learning Chinese for a few years, and it's even more
| fascinating here as most words are two characters, and those
| characters themselves usually have their own meanings. If you
| were to look up the English word, you'll usually find a host of
| different translations you might be able to use, but if you just
| try to learn a one-to-one mapping, you'll never really understand
| them. It only when you look at the meanings of those words that
| you'll start to understand the nuances a bit better. For
| instance, the English word "clear" might be translated as (I'll
| use pinyin rather than characters) to a bunch of words that
| clearly (sic) have some connection to each other: qingchu (clear
| about something, can understand something), qingche (clear,
| transparent, _limpid_ ), qingxi (clarity, distinct), mingxian
| (obvious, evident, distinct), mingbai (understood, obvious,
| frank, explicit), mingque (clarify, explicit, clear-cut), queding
| (definite), qinglang (clear day), touming (transparent), xiande
| (apparent), and many other translations for other meanings that
| don't really relate in Chinese such as clear conscience, clear
| diary, clear road, etc... Looking at these Chinese words shows a
| number of related characters: qing, chu, che, xi, ming, xian,
| que, lang, and looking at those independently is like seeing big
| sets of Venn diagrams of concepts, and the individual Chinese
| words are kind of the Chinese intersections of those concepts and
| the English word "clear" includes some (but not all) of those
| concepts, along with some others of its own. For instance,
| there's a fairly large overlap between chu and che in these words
| (roughly transparency), ming and lang (roughly brightness), etc.
| What's really good about Chinese is that after learning enough of
| these, you start to intuit a meaning for the characters and you
| can sometimes correctly guess the feeling of the Chinese word
| without necessarily being able to actually translate it into
| English.
|
| Whilst learning some of these words, I've discovered new English
| words, so e.g. qingche is translated as "clear, limpid" and I'd
| never come across "limpid" before, but now I have a new English
| word for "completely transparent". Similarly, as I've been
| learning words for some common medical terms, rather that just
| being a random word for a condition you've heard of but don't
| really know what it is, the Chinese word has enough meaning that
| you can actually understand it, e.g. "pulmonary edema" (I'd heard
| it before but had no idea what it actually was) in Chinese is
| "fei shui zhong" - literally a liquid swelling in the lung.
| robbiep wrote:
| Loved your thought process and walk through linguistics.
|
| I'd have to take exception to the medical examples however -
|
| I'm not sure if the translation is 'a liquid swelling in the
| lung' or 'liquid swelling in the lung' both of which are
| technically incorrect, one more than the other.
|
| In actual fact the English is highly descriptive, just not in
| layman's terms, and you need to learn another whole vocabulary
| in order to understand it.
|
| This is beneficial because medicine is a highly technical. We
| were told in our first day of med school that we would learn
| around 5000 words by the time we were done. You can be come
| conversant in most languages with much less than that.
|
| The Chinese example you're providing (I have no idea if that's
| the term Chinese doctors would use in their notes) seems more
| akin to how I would describe pulmonary oedema to a patient or
| family member - 'you have water on your lungs'
| ralferoo wrote:
| > I'm not sure if the translation is 'a liquid swelling in
| the lung' or 'liquid swelling in the lung' both of which are
| technically incorrect, one more than the other.
|
| I'm not really sure of the difference between these two, but
| I'm not a doctor so any liquid in the lungs sounds bad to me!
| But I probably also translated it wrongly, as Chinese grammar
| is kind of different to English anyway. In Chinese, there's
| no real difference between "a something", "the something" and
| just "something", although you could say "one something" if
| you particularly want to indicate a single item.
|
| The actual characters are Fei Shui Zhong , where Fei (fei4)
| is a noun that means lung, Shui (shui3) is a noun that
| usually means water, but also often just liquid generally,
| and Zhong (zhong3) which could be a noun meaning a swelling
| or bump, or a verb meaning to swell. According to my
| dictionary, Shui Zhong together means oedema or "having an
| excess of watery fluid", but like I say I've only heard this
| word in English and never really knew what it was, because
| I've never _needed_ to know, so that was really the point -
| that the Chinese word is naturally more descriptive. In
| general, the way this word is formed, the Fei (lung) at the
| start as a noun followed by another noun, generally means
| that the first noun provides the context, and the second noun
| provides more detail, which is why I translated it as "in
| the lung". It's not really the correct translation as
| literally "swelling in the lung" would be more precisely "Fei
| Li De Shui Zhong " where Li means "inside" and De is kind
| of like 's. A guess the more natural understanding of Fei
| Shui Zhong would be "pertaining to the lung, excess of
| fluid".
|
| But, I don't think this kind of explicitness is unique to
| this, for instance "pneumonia" is Fei Yan , which is the same
| Fei (fei4) lung and Yan (yan2) which means inflammation or
| flame as a noun or hot as an adjective. As an aside, while
| I've seen both meanings of the word before, I've only just
| realised that it's kind of odd that inflammation (which I
| associate more as swelling and not heat) and flame is
| actually common to both meanings in English as well. Looking
| up other words with Yan , gives me Shen Yan which is Shen
| (shen4) meaning kidney and Yan (yan2) meaning inflammation.
| Again, I've never once heard "nephritis" in English, and
| would have no idea how to guess at its meaning, but it's kind
| of obvious from the Chinese meaning. Similarly "gastritis"
| (at least I know this one!) is Wei Yan where Wei (wei4)
| means stomach and "dermatitis" is Pi Yan where Pi (pi2) is
| skin. There's a bunch more similar ones, but I think the
| pattern is obvious.
|
| I'm sure Chinese probably does have some random and non-
| obvious medical words that I haven't come across, but most of
| the ones I have learned aren't necessarily obvious until you
| know them, but are easy to remember afterwards, e.g. "having
| a fever" is Fa Shao where Fa (fa1) means to send out and
| Shao (shao1) means to burn.
|
| Oh, and yeah 5000 words is a lot of extra vocabulary! I'm
| still only around 4000 words in Chinese and I can survive
| most conversations and usually explain what word I mean even
| if I don't know what the word is!
| dtgriscom wrote:
| In 1985 I was working for DEC in Massachusetts, editing with
| Emacs. I often used the embedded dictionary to make sure my
| spelling was correct. Little did I know that the DEC system's
| Emacs was maintained by a corporate branch in England, so my
| document had lots of "colour"s, "recognise"s and "analogue"s.
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