[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Bent C Dalager) writes: > In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, > George Neuner <gneuner2/@comcast.net> wrote: >>On Wed, 3 Oct 2007 09:36:40 +0000 (UTC), [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Bent C >>Dalager) wrote: >> >>> >>>Only if you're being exceedingly pedantic and probably not even >>>then. Webster 1913 lists, among other meanings, >>> >>>Free >>>(...) >>>"Liberated, by arriving at a certain age, from the control >>>of parents, guardian, or master." >>> >>>The point presumably being that having been "liberated", you are now >>>"free".
Not as much "been" liberated, but "turned" liberated. >>Dictionaries used to be the arbiters of the language - any word or >>meaning of a word not found in the dictionary was considered a >>colloquial (slang) use. Since the 1980's, an entry in the >>dictionary has become little more than evidence of popularity as the >>major dictionaries (OED, Webster, Cambridge, etc.) will now consider >>any word they can find used in print. > > Apparantly, you missed the part where I referred to the 1913 edition > of Webster. I have kept it in the quoted text above for your > convenience. I can assure you that 1913 is both more than 30 years > ago /and/ it is before 1980, in case that was in doubt. But picking just a single word from a whole explanation of _one_ naming and declaring it as equivalent is not really being careful with language at all. And even when using a Thesaurus, it should be clear that the offered alternatives are not supposed to or capable of capturing all nuances of the keyword. -- David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
