The OUPblog mentions that (link) Ammon Shea, who at one time or another has posted here (link), has a new book coming out in August, Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages.
quote:
All dictionaries have mistakes. Ghost words creep in, there are occasional misspellings, or perhaps the printer was hung over one day and misplaced some punctuation. In addition to these normal forms of human error there are others that are created by language, as it continues its inexorable change, rendering definitions and spellings obsolete. Furthermore, as the science of lexicography itself advances, certain things, such as etymologies, that made sense a hundred years ago, begin to look suspect in a modern light.
Good news ! We can stop worrying about our Mouse and its Allies.
[…] “…the whimsical anthropomorphizer in me is sad to see that murinoid has had its definition changed from ‘Resembling the mouse or its allies’ to ‘Resembling a mouse; (Zool.) of or belonging to the subfamily Murinae…’ When I read the first definition I found myself afterwards musing about who the allies of the mouse were, whether they had previously been enemies, and who it was they were allied against; after I read the new definition I did not find my imagination tickled in the same way.” - Absurd Entries in the OED: An introduction to Ammon Shea […]
Posts: 6546 | Location: Kehena Beach, Hawaii, U.S.A.
If Mr. Shea had know that an ally can be (fig.) "Anything akin to another by community of structure or properties, or placed near it in classification (OED Online, def. 6) then he might have realized the two definitions were essentially the same.
Dictionary.com offers this definition (def. 5): "Biology. a plant, animal, or other organism bearing an evolutionary relationship to another, often as a member of the same family: The squash is an ally of the watermelon."
Richard, he only posted here to answer a question that Wordcrafter had addressed to him over the phone. Novobatzky and Shea wrote "Depraved and Insulting English," and one of the words they cite is "epicaricacy." Shea was able to provide us with the background on this word. I didn't expect that he'd stay here.
Thanks for the heads up, z. I am so going to read this book!
