the best dictionaries

[Erin McKean]

On Mon, 15 Dec 2003 RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:

> A friend asked me, "How do you know what the BEST dictionaries are?"
>
> How do professional linguists and lexicographers answer that question?
>

"What is the best dictionary?" is *almost* a nonsensical question -- it's
like "What is the best pair of shoes?" The missing part of that question
is "for me, for what I want to do?" Dictionaries have many uses -- not just
"looking up definitions" but "discovering etymologies," "playing Scrabble,"
"browsing," "pronunciations," "dropping from the castle walls onto
besiegers," etc.

There has never been a dictionary yet that is all things to all people,
and for that we should be thankful. How very boring it would be without
dictionaries to argue over! (And how very large and unwieldy that
all-to-all dictionary would be.) All lexicographers (and their
fifth-column sympathizers in other fields) should take every opportunity
to replace the notion of "The Dictionary" with specific instances actual
dictionaries.

It's easier, but by no means simple, to point to a particular book or
books and say "This is a bad dictionary," but that is also an incomplete
statement. Many people (many, many more people than I would like) use
what I would consider to be "bad dictionaries" every day and suffer no
lasting harm, or, truth be told, any harm at all. If you only need to know
how many "c's" are in "recommend," or how to pronounce "macabre," or (heh, heh)
 whether you REALLY mean "disinterested" or "uninterested," it has to be a
very, very bad dictionary indeed to steer you wrong. Would people who have
"bad" dictionaries lead better, happier, more fulfilled and productive
lives if they had "better" dictionaries? I'd like to think so (and I try very
hard to convince people of this), but hard evidence is lacking.

Saying this, I can hear somebody, faintly, in the distance, muttering
that Johnsonian saw about "Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better
than none and even the best is not quite true." Dictionaries today are
even more like watches than they were in Johnson's time. But the existence
of the cheap $6 digital (that breaks the first time you forget to take it
off while washing the dishes) doesn't stop the atomic-clock people from
spending billions to determine the exact time down to the vacillation of a
single electron. And just as the electron-vacillation technology
(eventually) makes its way down to the $6 digital (or perhaps somewhere just
above that point) the research that we do for the "best" dictionaries makes its
way down to the book equivalent of the $6 watch.

To summarize (which means [help me out here discourse-analysts] "I should
have stopped typing several paragraphs back"): dictionaries are not
one-size-fits-all, there is no such thing as
"THE DICTIONARY," and we are in a blessed time in human history, a golden
age where there is a dictionary for every need, taste, and station, so
much so that we are spoiled for choice and, in fact, so much so that there is
no excuse for not owning as many dictionaries as you have pairs of shoes
(or at least watches).

Erin McKean