[Lexicog] Dishwashers and computers

[Patrick Hanks]

> ... properly refers to a machine, not a person.

"Properly"?  "Conventionally" might be better, as it does not have the
prescriptive overtones of "properly". The conventional senses of words tend
to change unpredictably, as I guess everyone on this list knows.
Dictionaries on historical principles provide a rich record of such obsolete
conventions, placing them first, as they are older (no doubt to the
confusion of computational linguists and other naive readers who do not
understand the implications of "historical prinicples" and who beleive that
older meanings are somehow more correct than modern meanings).  The Shorter
Oxford, for example, has:

  dishwasher [subentry under "dish"]: "a servant who washes dishes; a
machine that does this automatically."

  computer: "1. a person who makes calculations; spec. a person employed for
this in an observatory etc. 2. An apparatus for making calculations ..."

If I remember rightly, the second definition in each case was not added
until the 1993 edition.

I was a dishwasher once, but never a machine.

Patrick


----- Original Message ----- 
From: <rtroike at email.arizona.edu>
To: <lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, May 29, 2006 10:44 AM
Subject: [Lexicog] Dishwasher



David Frank <david_frank at sil.org> wrote:

> A dishwasher
> properly refers to a machine, not a person.

Some on this list may be old enough to recall that a typical entry-level
job in most restaurants was "dishwasher". The unmarked use was definitely
[+Human]. None of us, I'm sure, remember the time when "typewriter" was
similarly the label for a job category rather than a machine (now some
may be wondering "What's a typewriter?" -- the usual explanation nowadays
is that it is something like a computer.)

     Rudy Troike





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