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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 June 2016
There is a widely accepted fiction that anything printed in a dictionary has, by virtue of its presence there, a kind of divine authority. Thus lexicographers are sometimes called as expert witnesses in courts of law, and dictionaries themselves can be used in evidence. Professor Daniel Cook has based an interesting article on a case in Maryland in 1913, in which a man was charged on the complaint of a young woman that he had accosted her with the greeting, “Hello, chicken.” The defendant stated that chicken was “a perfectly proper term. Just look in Webster’s dictionary and you will find that I have transgressed no laws.” The magistrate found an antiquated copy of Webster in his desk and read, “Chicken—The young of various birds, a child, a young woman.”
This paper was originally given as one of invitational Summer Session lectures at the University of Victoria, August 1969.
1 American Speech, 34. 20-25 (February, 1959), reprinted in Allen, Harold B., Applied English Linguistics, 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1964), 450–56.Google Scholar
2 The relevant definition numbers have been added in parentheses.
3 Klein, Ernest, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (New York: Elsevier; A-K 1966, L-Z 1967), p. 1637.Google Scholar
4 I am indebted to Dr. Samuel C. Monson, of Scott, Foresman and Company, Glenview, Illinois, for supplying the two following citations as well as that from Parade on the next page.
5 The idea that meanings for different parts of speech should be given under main sense groupings rather than in separate blocks (or even separate entries) arose out of discussions and correspondence with Dr. Samuel C. Monson some years ago.
6 Bolinger, Dwight, Aspects of Language (New York: Harcourt, 1968), p. 288.Google Scholar