From: John K Clark (johnkclark@fastmail.fm)
Date: Sat Mar 07 2009 - 22:49:49 MST
On Sat, 07 Mar 2009 "Charles Hixson"
<charleshixsn@earthlink.net> said:
> define, df. To set boundaries around.
> To limit a term to a certain area
> of coverage. From the latin fine,
> a fence or boundary.
If I already knew what “define” meant there would no point in asking you
to define “define”; if I didn’t know what the word meant I would never
ask you to define “define”. If I didn’t know what the word klognee meant
I wouldn’t ask you to klognee “klognee” and it wouldn’t be very
illuminating to me even if you did klognee “klognee” because the phrase
would be no more meaningful than a burp. A definition of definition is
really stupid; stuff like that could give dictionaries a bad name.
Instead you could point at a dog and say “that is a quadruped because it
has 4 legs and explanations like that are called definitions”. Without
examples it’s all just a bunch of ASCII squiggles “defining” each other
and round and round we go.
John K Clark
-- John K Clark johnkclark@fastmail.fm -- http://www.fastmail.fm - One of many happy users: http://www.fastmail.fm/docs/quotes.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:01:04 MDT