Are dictionaries obsolete?

Being a lexicographer compiling dictionaries in the internet age can be viewed as both exciting, because of all the new words that can quickly gain currency, or a nightmare, because one has to decide whether to include some new word or not and what the word might even mean, knowing that whatever you decide will be hotly contested by some.

In a review of the book Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionaryby Stefan Fatsis, Louis Menand looks at the history of the modern dictionary.

Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, published in London in 1755, carved out a role for the dictionary: to establish what would become known as Standard English. Johnson himself was aware that language is a living thing, always in flux. But his dictionary, with its conclusiveness, was a huge publishing success. It was considered authoritative well into the nineteenth century. In England, it would be replaced by the Oxford English Dictionary. But, in the United States, its role was usurped by Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language, which made its début in 1828.

Webster deliberately set out to supersede Johnson. His ambition was to create not a dialect of British English but an identifiably American language. Johnson’s dictionary had about forty-two thousand words; Webster’s had seventy thousand. Webster added New World words including “skunk,” “boost,” and “roundabout”; words with Native American origins, such as “canoe” and “moose”; words derived from Mexican Spanish, like “coyote.” Most dramatically, he Americanized spelling, a project started in an earlier work of his, a schoolbook speller called “A Grammatical Institute of the English Language,” published in 1783. It is because of Webster that we write “defense” and “center” rather than “defence” and “centre,” “public” and not “publick.” He changed the language.

Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition, announced as “unabridged,” appeared in 1934. Web. II was a doorstop—six hundred thousand entries, thirty-five thousand geographical names, and, in the appendix, thirteen thousand biographical names. 

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US uses visa bans to aid tech companies

It has long been the case, probably since the end World War II which saw the emergence of the US as the dominant world power largely unscathed by the destruction that had been wrought in Europe, that the US saw itself as the one true power and that other nations, including those ostensibly its allies in Europe, as vassal states. This was not overtly stated. Instead we had supposedly multi-nation collaborative arrangements such as NATO and various economic groupings, as the US sought to limit the impact of the USSR and the Warsaw pact countries, and later with Russia when that pact collapsed. But there was always the steel hand beneath that velvet glove, the implied threat that the US would always want to have its own way in international affairs.

But in the Trump era, that veneer of cooperation has been rapidly wearing away and the steel hand is now manifesting itself in many ways, big and small. One way is of course the unilateral imposition of tariffs and other trade measures. The other is the demand that other countries not impose their laws on those US companies and industries that the US favors, such as the tech sector, which has been accused of actively encouraging harmful behaviors on the internet.

This took a dramatic turn yesterday when the US imposed visa bans on five EU high-ranking officials who had been involved in the drafting and execution of laws regulating tech companies.
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The slow release of the Epstein files

I was not in the least surprised that the release of the Epstein files was limited and consisted of heavily redacted pages. It was never in the cards that attorney general Pam Bondi, loyal and obsequious sycophant of Trump that she is, would ever allow the release of anything that might even remotely embarrass him. or anyone close to him However, the limited release and the sweeping nature of the redactions has caused an uproar, and has resulted in further dribs and drabs coming out.

One new release today was a sickening letter that Epstein purportedly sent to Larry Nasser the doctor now in prison for sexually abusing large numbers of young women, including members of the US gymnastics team. The letter was postmarked August 13, 2019, three days after Epstein died by suicide.

“As you will know by now, I have taken the ‘short route’ home,” the letter, which appears to have been signed from Epstein to Nasser, reads. “Good luck! We shared one thing … our love & caring for young ladies and the hope they reach their full potential.”

The letter continues: “Our president also shares our love of young, nubile girls. When a young beauty walked by he loved to ‘grab snatch’, whereas we ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system.”

The letter is signed: “Life is unfair. Yours, J. Epstein.”
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The letter is postmarked 13 August 2019, notably three days after Epstein died in custody in what was ruled a suicide. It was found by investigators in the jail mail room weeks later after it was returned from a prison in Arizona and marked “no longer at this address”.
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The document comes as questions continue to swirl around Epstein’s death in custody, with his brother, Mark Epstein, continuing to maintain that the sex offender was murdered in his cell.

It has also been suggested that Epstein blamed his former friend Donald Trump for his 2019 arrest on sex-trafficking charges, which came more than a decade after he was granted immunity from prosecution under a 2007 Florida state plea deal where he pleaded guilty to solicitation of a minor.

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The menace of influencers and the ‘Free Birth’ movement

I am becoming increasingly concerned whenever I see the word ‘influencer’ associated with someone on the internet. It is a vaguely defined terms and a brief search yields examples such as “one who exerts influence : a person who inspires or guides the actions of others” or “a person who is able to generate interest in something (such as a consumer product) by posting about it on social media” or “a person who has become well known through regular social media posts and is able to promote a product or service by recommending or using it online.”

I would like to add a further definition as “someone who has no real expertise or credentials about whatever they are talking about but are using their own experience or those of a few others to make sweeping claims that others should follow their advice even when that can be dangerous”.

I don’t really care about influencers who advise people about restaurants or hotels or vacation spots or what cleaning and cooking utensils to buy. Sure, the advice may be useless and they are likely being paid to shill for those things. But those are usually harmless and only result in a loss of money for the gullible. I am more concerned about those who give medical advice about treating ailments or who promote diets that can be harmful if continued for a long time.

One of the more dangerous influencers that I read about recently was in an investigative series by reporters from the Guardian newspaper promoting something called ‘free births’. To be clear, these are not so-called natural or unassisted births where women choose to give birth at home under the guidance of midwives and doulas who are able to quickly summon medical help if something goes seriously wrong with the delivery. (A midwife is a trained medical professional who knows how to deliver babies while a doula is someone who has no medical training but provides non-medical emotional and moral support.)
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When Archie Bunker meets Meathead

Much has been written in tribute about Rob Reiner after the brutal murder of him and his wife Michele. Rob was the son of actor and writer Carl Reiner and became well known playing the liberal Michael Stivic as a counterpoint to the bigoted Archie Bunker in the groundbreaking TV series All in the Family, a show that broached many social issues and taboos.

Much to Archie’s displeasure, Stivic is the boyfriend (and later husband) of Bunker’s daughter Gloria. In this clip we see the first meeting of Stivic and Archie and Edith (his wife) and hear the first time that he is called ‘Meathead’, the name that stuck forever after.

The perils of perfectionism

There was an interesting article in the August 11, 2025 issue of The New Yorker about the pain that can be caused by being a perfectionist, in that it can lead to depression, eating disorders, and even suicide. To understand why, we need to distinguish perfectionism from the mere desire to excel or be the best at something. While those latter characteristics can skirt close to the boundary of perfectionism, they are not the same thing. What characterizes perfectionism is the feeling that whatever one does or achieves, it is never good enough and requires more work. This can lead to not completing projects because one is constantly making changes without moving on or holding back and not submitting articles or papers because of the need to do more research, more experiments, or explore obscure side issues, and so on. This can lead to a sense of frustration because of the loss of productivity. Perhaps the most dangerous issue is with eating disorders such as anorexia where however thin someone gets, they feel they are not thin enough.

The article focuses on the work of two psychologists Gordon Flett and Paul Hewitt who have spent decades studying this and produced a model that describes three types: “self-oriented perfectionism (requiring perfection of oneself), other-oriented perfectionism (railing against the imperfections of others), and socially prescribed perfectionism (believing that others require one to be perfect).”
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The story of punctuation

I am fascinated by the evolution of language but had never given much thought to punctuation. If I gave it any consideration at all, I tended to think of punctuation marks such as the period, the comma, and the apostrophe as somehow having been there from the beginning of writing, appearing somewhat organically along with writing. But according to Florence Hazrat at the University of Sheffield, the origin of punctuation marks can be dated quite precisely.

In the broad sense, punctuation is any glyph or sign in a text that isn’t an alphabet letter. This includes spaces, whose inclusion wasn’t always a given: in classical times stone inscriptions as well as handwritten texts WOULDLOOKLIKETHIS – written on scrolls, potentially unrolling forever. Reasons for continuous script aren’t entirely clear, but might be connected to a conception of writing as record of speech rather than a practice in itself, and since we’re hardly aware of the minuscule pauses we make between words when speaking, it isn’t obvious to register something we do and perceive unconsciously with a designated sign that is a non-sign: blank space.

Writing without punctuation lasted for many hundreds of years, in spite of individual efforts such as those of Aristophanes, the librarian at Alexandria. Around 200 BCE, Aristophanes of Alexandria wished to ease pronunciation of Greek for foreigners by suggesting small circles at different levels of the line for pauses of different lengths, emphasising the rhythm of the sentence though not yet its grammatical shape.

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Some days, the news is just too depressing to blog

Although I do not always comment on breaking news, that news is on my mind and these last two days it has just been too awful to ignore, while to write about it just makes me feel even worse.

I am talking about the terrible succession of events. First we had the shooting at Brown University, then we had the horrific massacre of Jews celebrating Hanukkah in Australia, and then we had the brutal murder of Rob and Michele Reiner in their home, allegedly by their son.

And if all that wasn’t bad enough, we have Trump positively gloating over the deaths of the Reiners. The depths of sociopathology to which that man can sink never cease to amaze me.

So take this post as an open thread, to comment on what you will.