Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries
What was that thing we had learned in our rhetoric class, about Derrida’s “deferral of meaning” and how words are merely signs that can never fully summon what they mean? Yet words are all we have, simultaneously bringing us closer, casting us farther away.
Hua Hsu • Stay True: A Memoir (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
Yet the weird truth is that for all their artifactual splendor, dictionaries are starkly misleading portraits of something as endlessly transforming as language. In terms of how words actually exist in time and space, to think of a word’s “genuine” meaning as the one you find upon looking it up is like designating a middle-aged person’s high school
... See moreJohn McWhorter • Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally)
