Historical Principles

I broke my Koboglo e-reader in a very cunning way. Stepping up from my seat and back from the desk my foot looped around the cord of the headphones which lassoed the reader in its cushioney pooch and pitched it to the floor. The wire connecting to the screen was broken by the impact and as I was quoted 60€ to fix it I thought it as well to get a new one. This time I went for a Kindle Paperwhite. I wasn’t aware that they had special offers on the screensaver by default, with a banner on the opening page. They only appear once you’ve registered which is further into the Amazon ecosystem than I like. Relentless eyeworms bore into your brain. Solution: Reset to pristine factory state, don’t register and get very pleasant screensavers of nibs, typeface, pen and ink. You lose the special offers which I have no use for anyway and cloud access and the free dictionary. The last is a loss which turned out to be a gain because I was able to find a 1913 version of Webster’s Dictionary which is on historical principles and out of copyright. An excellent dictionary which is true to Johnsonian individuality. This site will tell you how.
dictionary
I dragged and dropped which worked for me.
He also has an essay on why you’re probably using the wrong dictionary which is witty and persuasive.
wrong dictionary
Yes I agree and can offer you a test. Look up catamite. In my Concise Oxford dictionary of ‘72 edited by the Fowlers H.W. & F.G. the definition is sodomite’s minion. In the Shorter Oxford Dicionary (S.O.D. ’87) the definitions is a boy kept for unnatural purposes. The Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (‘77) has a boy kept by a pederast. It seems to me that the first definition is tart, crisp and to the point, the second might be judgmental which is a fault and the third is imprecise. The Webster’s 1913 has the same definition as S.O.D. '87. Watch that space.

A good e-reader though once purged.

Fowler howler

Editing in Wikipedia, in regards to plain English, is patchy. We know what they mean because unlike French which has to be spoken perfectly to be understood English receives a universal mangling which we accept. The entry on Fowler has a howler or three; ironic when its subject was a stern examiner of all solecisms and paralogisms including the use of pedantic expressions when not strictly warranted.
Henry Watson Fowler
So limping on but by the way shooting yourself in the foot was a deliberate act to get you out of the battle.

We are told that at Rugby He concentrated in Latin and Greek. The writer seems to have been caught between ‘concentrated on’ and ‘specialised in’ and the wrong preposition was the result.

There was an E. P. Lemarchand, whose sister eventually married Arthur Fowler. Did his persistence pay off or was it merely that she later married Arthur. ‘Eventually’ gives the impression of a long siege before the surrender of her hand in marriage.

In partnership with his brother Francis and beginning in 1906, he began publishing seminal grammar, style and lexicography books. Certainly those books were published but not by him; he wrote them together with his brother.

Although he participated little in Oxford sport,: Is that on Eurosport or is he talking about 'sport at Oxford’?

There was a brother Samuel: Samuel, the troublesome youngest brother, was sent to Sedbergh, probably to be taken care of by Henry and Arthur, but he only stayed a year before leaving the school, and of him nothing further is known. Presumably he became a ‘remittance’ man and spent his latter days writing to the Australian Times (?) about split infinitives.