Feeling slightly embarrassed and disgusted with myself, I bought Krys a beer in an attempt to ease my conscience. "Fuck" I thought to myself, "I'm turning into an arsehole". He apologised profusely and promptly dashed off to get my four quid back for me. When I saw Ruffnek Discotek co-organiser Krys, I gave him a stiff reprimand for his oversight.
THE CHIRAL NIGHT RHYTHM CARNIVAL DOWNLOAD FOR FREE
But when you consider that, less than a year ago, I'd never been on a guestlist for anything ever, it seems odd that I'm already growing very accustomed to the preferential treatment afforded by my blogging activities, to the point where I now actually expect to get in for free (apart from Pinch's dances, of course!). Helicon Publishing is a division of Research Machines plc.They forgot to put me on the guestlist, the shits. It is not a dictionary to be left on the shelf, but a practical problem-solver whose every entry serves a purpose. It gives you access to the farthest reaches of English vocabulary, including within its modest compass terms that can otherwise be found only in the largest multi-volume unabridged dictionaries and specialist reference books. It is a compendium of around 14,000 of the more troublesome and obscure words in the English language. That is the idea behind The Hutchinson Dictionary of Difficult Words. The space saved by omitting the likes of and, be, do, house, and small can be much more profitably given to words whose meaning, spelling, pronunciation, etc. As far as the practical needs of users are concerned, it makes much better sense to include only words that they are likely to look up. No dictionary, however big, can be a hundred percent comprehensive – much less a pocket dictionary. However, even the huge Oxford English Dictionary would not seriously make that claim.
Confirmed by Dr Johnson's magisterial English Dictionary of 1755, this is the tradition that has won out: we now assume that dictionaries will be inventories of all the words of a language. But in the 18th century, the practice began to grow of including more everyday words as well. These are termed 'hard-word dictionaries'. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the commonest type of lexical reference book was one that included only those words that might present some difficulty to the user, through unfamiliarity, orthographic irregularity, etc. But that is not how they have always been. We rather take this feature of dictionaries for granted, as if that is how they have always been, and therefore that is how they should always be. As dictionaries descend the ladder of size past 'concise' to 'pocket', it is the less frequent and less familiar words that are omitted the ones we all know are allowed to stay. When was the last time you needed to find out the meaning of the or but, the spelling of cat or dog? And yet dictionaries compiled for adult native-speakers of English take care to include such straightforward words, which present no difficulty to dictionary users, and which consequently are seldom – if ever – looked up. The Hutchinson Dictionary of Difficult Words Preface The general dictionaries which we all have on our bookshelves and desks, and which we constantly consult, have one significant but little-considered characteristic in common: much of their contents is never used.
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