I am a creature of routine, with one being my commitment to my daily habit of tending to the upkeep and maintenance of my library. A pastor’s library Is a dynamic assortment of books, with new books being continually added, old books that have proven to be useless being frequently discarded, and my filing system (adapted from the library system given to me by my former pastor, the late Dr. Eli Harju) needing constant updating.
Today I dealt with the books related to philology, reminding
myself how much I enjoy Roget’s Thesaurus before coming to my 1967 reprint of
Noah Webster’s 1828 edition dictionary, purchased while I was a student at PCBBC.
While reminiscing about the time in my life when I bought Webster’s dictionary,
several memories came to mind.
My first memory was related to an awareness that some of my
classmates completely misunderstood the dynamic nature of language. The only
languages that are static are languages that are dead. Misunderstanding this
reality, which is readily apprehended by those who read, resulted in some of my
classmates completely misunderstanding the usefulness of Webster’s 1828
dictionary. It was clear from their conversations back in the day that they
held Webster’s 1828 dictionary to be the be-all and final end-all authority for
the meanings of English words.
Such an attitude can be catastrophic, owing to the dynamic nature
of all languages, including English, especially when one remembers that not
only was there an already existing English dictionary published in Great
Britain (Samuel Johnson’s published in 1755), but that a dictionary printed in
1828 is only a snapshot of the range of meanings in that language, in that
region, and at that time. The reason Noah Webster published his dictionary,
after all, was owing to significant differences he noticed between Great Britain’s
English in 1755 and the USA’s brand of English in 1828.
However, that is not all. Moisés Silva
should have settled once and for all time among Bible-believing Christians with
his wonderful, Biblical Words And Their Meanings: An Introduction to
Lexical Semantics (published by Zondervan in 1983) that words do not
have “definitions” but ranges of meanings depending upon the contexts in which speakers
or writers use the words. The ways teenagers use the word “bad” sometimes to
mean “bad” and sometimes mean “good,” depending on the context, illustrates
this perfectly, as does the seven different meanings of kόsmoV in the New Testament.
Dictionaries are excellent tools, but they are most useful in the
hands of those with some understanding of the dynamic nature of all languages
and the fact that dictionaries do not tell anyone what a word means. Instead,
dictionaries are helpful to inform us of the range of meanings words might have
depending upon the contexts in which they are used at the time of their
publication.
What does this mean? Webster’s 1828 edition dictionary does not
tell us what words mean. Instead, it shows us the range of meanings of English
words in the new USA at the end of the second decade of the 19th
century. It is laughable that someone would be so naïve as to use Webster’s
1828 dictionary to indicate what a word means in the United States of
America in 2022!
