Lexicographer

娱乐性解釋/意思：

n. A pestilent fellow who under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language does what he can to arrest its growth stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods. For your lexicographer having written his dictionary comes to be considered 'as one having authority whereas his function is only to make a record, not to give a law. The natural servility of the human understanding having invested him with judicial power, surrenders its right of reason and submits itself to a chronicle as if it were a statute. Let the dictionary (for example) mark a good word as obsolete ' or 'obsolescent ' and few men thereafter venture to use it whatever their need of it and however desirable its restoration to favor—whereby the process of impoverishment is accelerated and speech decays. On the contrary the bold and discerning writer who recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense has no following and is tartly reminded that 'it isn't in the dictionary ' —although down to the time of the first lexicographer (Heaven forgive him!) no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary. In the golden prime and high noon of English speech; when from the lips of the great Elizabethans fell words that made their own meaning and carried it in their very sound; when a Shakespeare and a Bacon were possible and the language now rapidly perishing at one end and slowly renewed at the other was in vigorous growth and hardy preservation—sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion—the lexicographer was a person unknown the dictionary a creation which his Creator had not created him to create.

手打:奥利