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An opinion piece excerpted from his book Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English. Grammar Puss Archived 2014-04-30 at the Wayback Machine, by Steven Pinker (1994). Argues against prescriptive rules. A revised draft of this article became the chapter "The Language Mavens" in The Language Instinct
A thesaurus (pl.: thesauri or thesauruses), sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings (or in simpler terms, a book where one can find different words with similar meanings to other words), [1] [2] sometimes as a hierarchy of broader and narrower terms, sometimes simply as lists of synonyms and antonyms.
A aggravate – Some have argued that this word should not be used in the sense of "to annoy" or "to oppress", but only to mean "to make worse". According to AHDI, the use of "aggravate" as "annoy" occurs in English as far back as the 17th century. In Latin, from which the word was borrowed, both meanings were used. Sixty-eight percent of AHD4's usage panel approves of its use in "It's the ...
In statutory interpretation, sui generis refers to the problem of giving meaning to groups of words where one of the words is ambiguous or inherently unclear. In road traffic law, a statute may require consideration of large vehicles separately from other vehicles. The word "large" is ambiguous per se but may be considered "heavy". The relevant ...
A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means precisely or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. [2] For example, in the English language, the words begin, start, commence, and initiate are all synonyms of one another: they are synonymous. The standard test for synonymy is substitution: one form can be ...
Credulity. Credulity is a person's willingness or ability to believe that a statement is true, especially on minimal or uncertain evidence. [1][2] Credulity is not necessarily a belief in something that may be false: the subject of the belief may even be correct, but a credulous person will believe it without good evidence.
A defining vocabulary is a list of words used by lexicographers to write dictionary definitions. The underlying principle goes back to Samuel Johnson's notion that words should be defined using 'terms less abstruse than that which is to be explained', [1] and a defining vocabulary provides the lexicographer with a restricted list of high-frequency words which can be used for producing simple ...
The term doxa is an ancient Greek noun (δόξα) related to the verb dokein (δοκεῖν), meaning 'to appear, to seem, to think, to accept'. [1] Between the 3rd and 1st centuries BC, the term picked up an additional meaning when the Septuagint used doxa to translate the Biblical Hebrew word for "glory" (כבוד, kavod).