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To: ThanhPhero
People who use such words with their new street validated meanings usually have problems discussing things that require that they and their interlocutors actually know what they are talking about.

This is your defense? To discredit the dictionary? To discredit ALL of them??? Wow! It seems odd that the publishers wouldn't contact an authority like you when they were compiling them, given your regal prerogative of invalidating their conclusions on a whim. It's lucky for Sam Johnson you weren't around when he was putting his Lexicon together. He'd have looked the fool without checking with YOU first!

You'd better drop a line to those gangstas at the Oxford English. A homedawg cain't hawdly unnastan DOSE homies.

It becomes feelings and emotions because that doesn't require any precision.

Interesting sentence. "It" -- being a singular pronoun -- hardly seems adequate to take a compound predicate nominative ("feelings and emotions"). And the subject of your independent clause ("THAT doesn't require any precision"), which serves to modify that compound plural, is also singular.

Your construction leaves some abiguity as to what exactly doesn't require any precision: emotions and feelings? or the act of "it" becoming "emotions and feelings"?

One might almost think that this sentence lacked grammatical precision.

182 posted on 07/20/2006 7:57:55 AM PDT by IronJack
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To: IronJack
Not all of them. The Second International is a good dictionary. The Third and its contemporaries came under the influence of the Modernists whose beliefs eventually metamorphosed into post-modernism and the principle that words have no meaning except to construct oppressive relationships. At the popular level the dictionaries ceased to be "prescriptive" and became "descriptive" i.e. they hold that there is nothing correct or incorrect and if Clinton wants to say that sex doesn't mean oral sex, or even the more straightforward kind for that matter, well he is just as correct as the next guy. Insofar as conservatives carry their conservatism over into their language use their arguments will always be superior to those of the Liberals- postmodernists all- even when the Liberals seem to have their facts straight because the words they use will contradict their facts at some point if they speak more than three sentences about the same subject because words, to them, mean only what they want them to mean at the time they speak them and they can use the same words with opposite meanings in the same conversation and think they are being totally consistent and brilliant.

I would hope that a conservative would not allow the Left to determine his language because that gives the argument to the Left because they, with perfect sincerity, will insist that you have said exactly the opposite of the words you used as you understood those words and if you have accepted the Left's linguistic principles they will have the best of the argument because you let them define the words you use and their definitions are always only conditional.

183 posted on 07/20/2006 9:20:43 AM PDT by ThanhPhero (di hanh huong den La Vang)
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