[TheForge] OT Etymology & (good and bad) dictionaries (was: Heat treating)

[Bruce Freeman]

Hmmm, I'm gonna have to think about your take on "short tempered."
It's too early in the morning...

As for ther WNCD (aka, the Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary) --
it's good for starting fires.  Tear out the pages in small clumps and
roll them into wads.  It's better than ordinary newspaper because its
contents are more inflammable (with the possible exception of the
tabloids -- which none of US read, of course!).

Webster's has a policy of accepting, as a definition, the current use
of a word.  While that may be helpful when it comes to understanding
colloquial English, especially as spouted by your teenager, it won't
do you much good in understanding the written word generally.

Take, for example the adjectives, "alternate" and "alternative."  The
former may best be understood by its meaning as a verb:  To alternate
between one condition and another.  On a trampoline, one alternates
between traveling up and traveling down.  Hence, "alternating current"
electricity alternates between voltage above and below ground.  All
very straight forward.

Now consider "alternative".  This word indicates one of two (or more,
sometimes) mutually exclusive stated.  The alternative to life is
death.  There really is no resemblance between this word and
"alternate."  But many people confuse them. There's no blame in
confusing them -- everybody makes mistakes.  But there is blame in
recognizing the error to be correct usage, and that's exactly what
WWCD does.  Look them up.

Were this the only such example, I wouldn't belabor it.  But how are
people to understand the written word if our reference books don't
tell the true story?

Fortunately, there's a much better reference:  The Oxford Dictionary
of the American Language. (Bet you didn't know that Oxford recognized
American as a language!)  Until  you can get yourself a copy of that,
you can get by with Wikipedia.org, which seems to get most definitions
right.






On Tue, Dec 6, 2011 at 1:36 PM, Mike Spencer <mspencer at tallships.ca> wrote:
>
> People have completely lost track of the original use of "temper",
> which refered to moderating an extreme or finding a balance between
> extremes.
>
> "Justice tempered with mercy" refers to moderating the (presumably)
> rigid, utterly unbending demads of justice.
>
> "Short tempered" uses "short" in the same sense as shortning in
> cooking (shortning bread is crumbly, not chewey) or refering to a
> batch of wrought iron as "hot short" meaning it crumbled when struck
> at what would normally be forging temperature. "Short tempered" means
> your personality is adjusted to the easily crumbled or shattered end
> of the scale and away from malleability.
>
> Even my WNCD gets it wrong, giving as meanings of "temper" (verb) (1)
> to soften hardened steel by reheating or (2) to harden steel
> by reheating and cooling in oil.
>
> - Mike
>
> --
> Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~.
>                                                           /V\
> mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
> http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^
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-- 
Bruce
NJ