rugged

[Ronald Butters]

It is not the case that the OED (and desk-top  dictionaries) are constructed with the needs of nonnative speakers primarily in mind in mind.  

Even so, my NOAD1 (the one I have in my computer) has this definition of "rugged":

rug•ged   adj. 
[1] (of ground or terrain) having a
broken, rocky, and uneven surface: a rugged coastline.
[2] (of a machine or other manufactured object)
strongly made and capable of withstanding rough
handling: the binoculars are compact, lightweight, and
rugged.   
[3] having or requiring toughness and determination:
a week of rugged, demanding adventure at an
outdoor training center.   
[4] (of a man’s face or looks)
having attractively strong, rough-hewn features: he
was known for his rugged good looks.


While it is certainly true that native speakers "often take less obvious meanings for granted," even so, would it really be all that difficult for a speaker of Albanian (much less a professional translator) to figure out that "rugged weather" was "weather that required toughness and determination" on the part of the weatheree? That a "rugged exam" was one that "required toughness and determination" on the part of the examinee? That "rugged potty training" was such as would "require toughness and determination" on the part of the trainee? Moreover, the contexts in which "rugged weather" occurs appear to generally clarify the meaning further--even, I would suggest, for the occasional nonnative speaker who actually looked up "rugged" after coming across one of the rare occurrences of "rugged weather." Foreigners understand metaphorical meanings as well as we do.

That said, NOAD1 DOES explicitly connect "nasty" (5,100 Google Book raw hits) and "rough" (127,000 hits) with weather. Perhaps this is just an instance of the old adage that everybody talks about the weather but only lexicographers do anything about it: while the occurrence of "rugged weather" is only about 1/3 of the occurrences for "rough weather" (when I did the search), it doesn't seem to me any more transparent than the other two, so one could certainly argue that putting it in (as AMERICAN HERITAGE has done) is not a horrible pedantic mistake. But I'd still say it is at best a borderline case and a judgment call for the lexicographer, and I don't think that the OED needs to rush out and add "rugged weather," given its relative transparency and rarity of occurrence. And if AMERICAN HERITAGE needs more room to add all the words of the year, I'd suggest that taking out "rugged weather" would not create a stir, in Albania or even Japan, much less Iowa.

As Burchfield noted in his introductory material, it is naive to think that a dictionary can--or even should--define every possible word; surely this extends to nuances of meanings as well. Online dictionaries may have the potential for being infinitely long, but too much information can render a dictionary useless, and give the impression that one nuance is as prevalent as another.

 


On Feb 6, 2011, at 12:43 PM, Paul Frank wrote:

> 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
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> 
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