Originally a piece in ScientificBlogging, September 28, 2009…
You open your dictionary to figure out what your friend meant by
‘nasute,’ only to find that the definition is “A wittol, or
jemadar; bannocked in an emunctory fashion.” What good is this
dictionary, you wonder, if it only refers me to other words I
don’t know? And worse still, the definitions of some of these
words refer back to ‘nasute,’ the word you didn’t know in the
first place! Even if your attempt to learn what ‘nasute’ means
is not infected by circularity, you face a quick explosion of
words to look up: the words in the definition, the words in each
of these definitions, and so on. The dictionary appears, then,
to be a terribly messy tangled web. In reality, however,
dictionaries aren’t quite that worthless. …and the definition of
‘nasute’ above is, thankfully, fiction. The standard line for
why dictionaries are useful is that the typical users of
dictionaries already know the meanings of much of the
dictionary, and so a disorderly dictiona