On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 10:59:10PM -0400, Igor Roshchin wrote: > > BTW, AFAIK, OED is focused more on British English. . .
Well, of course it is. But who else are you going to accept as the authority on the language? An anectode I fondly remember from my past: At one of the Cambridge Union debates, the principal guest speaker was Peter Ustinov. He was his usual erudite self, and used a couple of particularly florid expressions, provoking some mild heckling. They should have known better; he was prepared for that, en explained that he'd checked the usage first by looking the expression up in the OED. When this in turn was met by the anticipated cat-calls, he explained that he would have used some other dictionary, but apparently Cambridge didn't publish one! What he was not prepared for, though, was the immediate response from some unknown wit in the back benches: "We don't need to - we know all the words!" (No - I don't know who made the wisecrack. I couldn't see the speaker from where I was sitting up in the gallery, and I didn't recognise the voice.) -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
