rugged

[Paul Frank]

On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 4:00 PM,  <ronbutters at aol.com> wrote:

> Thanks to Paul for doing this research.
>
> A separate entry for "rugged weather" still seems like overkill to me. Anyone could figure out the meaning of "rugged weather" from the other definition in the same way that one could figure out "rugged toilet training" or "rugged oral exam". But I bow to the professional opinion of AMERICAN HERITAGE--if this isn't something they put in to see if other dictionary makers plagiarized their triviality.
>
> If they took this out, they would have room for "snood"!


I didn't do any research. I cut and pasted. But as someone who uses
dictionaries hundreds of times a day to pay the bills, I think that
the purpose of a dictionary is to tell its users what words mean and
how they are used today, and what they meant and how they were used in
the past. The "inclement" meaning of "rugged" is not at all obvious
from the other usual meanings of "rugged." Native speakers of a
language often take less obvious meanings of words for granted. But
it's the job of a comprehensive dictionary to provide explanations
even about words that most native speakers think don't need an
explanation, and it makes perfect sense for the OED, which purports to
be very comprehensive, to include this particular and by no means rare
meaning of "rugged." As for "rugged toilet training," I've never heard
that one, it gets a total of zero google hits, and I have no idea what
it might mean.

Paul

Paul Frank
Translator
Chinese, German, French, Italian > English
Espace de l'Europe 16
Neuchâtel, Switzerland
mobile +41 79 957 5318
paulfrank at bfs.admin.ch
paulfrank at post.harvard.edu

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