From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Wed May 14 2003 - 09:04:42 MDT
Harvey Newstrom wrote:
> ...
>
>What's the problem? Haven't you people ever looked these terms up in the
>dictionary before? Sheesh!
>...
>--
>Harvey Newstrom, CISSP, IAM, GSEC, IBMCP
><www.HarveyNewstrom.com> <www.Newstaff.com>
>
A dictionary represents an approximation of how one group of people used
words, or thought words should be used, at one particular time. They
are very useful for looking up words like "tholepin" or "wildebeest",
but much less useful for looking up works like "constructive" or
"liberal". Live words won't have exactly the same meaning that the
dictionary lists...or at best, the chances of this are minor. The OED
handles this by listing references where particular usages can be
located (I'd need to invent an example, as my copy is at home). This
isn't perfect, but at least it gives you some handle on when the
definition was (became?) current. A
"most recent significant" reference as well as an "oldest" reference
would improve the utility.
That said, I tend to consider myself conservative. I know that most
people tend to consider that I am either liberal or radical, or just
silly, but that doesn't change my opinion of myself. And I also tend to
consider the radical authoritarian centralists to be an exact opposite
of conservative. We have never before gone in for theocracies or
dictatorships, so to do so can't, in my view, be considered conservative
by any reasonable stretch. And I get quite confused by those who
consider that liberal and conservative are opposites. Social concern
for the poor has existed longer than the US has existed. Approaches to
handling it have differed, but the concern has been a constant (even if
it's only been to grubstake someone to get them out of town). So in
this context "liberal" would just mean favoring more social concern
rather than less, and conservative would mean holding onto the forms of
concern that are traditional. (This doesn't work... I think of myself
as conservative, but not as a blockhead. The traditional approaches
have depended on having intact communities, and those have been
systematically destroyed over the last century and a half...since, in
fact, the emergence of large-scale employers like the railroads. In the
1950's people worried about "The Organization Man" as a new
phenomenon...he wasn't new, the environment had just become so altered
that he was being preferred. It's become so accepted that people no
longer notice, but that was a sign that communities were nearly dead.)
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