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.

Epithets and Slurs

Epithet may have started being used as a genteelism for adjective as in the common locution racial epithets but it very quickly by association came to mean slur or derogatory expression. This is an American usage as there is no mention of it in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary. In Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1979 edn.) there it was: a disparaging or abusive word or phrase. This was offered after the primary meaning which would be the classical: a characterizing word or phrase accompanying or occurring in place of the name of a person or thing. No examples were given but I offer chaste Diana and The Iron Lady as typical. A great many Americans would resist the idea that the latter was an epithet for Margaret Thatcher whom they profess to admire. Is Lionhearted an epithet in the secondary American sense? Hardly. Internal strife in the family of meanings of a word is to be deprecated.

Genteelism: By genteelism is here to be understood the substituting, for the ordinary natural word that first suggests itself to the mind, of a synonym that is thought to be less soiled by the lips of the common herd, less familiar, less plebeian, less vulgar, less improper, less apt to come unhandsomely betwixt the wind & our nobility.

(from Modern English Usage by H.W. Fowler)