Mine collects detritus, dust, and fingertips. 
Well, I wouldnât go THAT far. In some cases our language works fine, and in others it doesnât. We donât need to throw away the baby with the bathwater but that doesnât mean we canât scrub the kid off, right?
Our language is a messy language, and often people from other nations have difficulty learning it, or say things that are brilliant in their language but sound silly when they try to translate it to ours. Itâs one of our most powerful tools, but also the most used and abused. How many of our politicians maintain their power by making deliberately deceiving statements abusing the language? How many have they murdered with it?
Heck, I was going to be hitting this from the direction of âmemorizing a bunch of irrational spellings and obscure rules should not be a source of pride, thatâs absurdâ . . . but youâve given me something better!
How about we start a subset dictionary that defines words and phrases clearly and succinctly? So literally only means literally and never means figuratively, and âPolice Actionâ is considered a weasel-term in that context and only âWarâ and other precise terms are present. Everybody learns âPlainspeakâ first, itâs far more difficult to misunderstand and maybe itâs even easier for voice recognition or more comfortable for those with foreign accents to speak. Might as well think long term.
And that way when a politician or a child tries to deceive us, we could tell them to answer in Plainspeak. . . and weâd see where they tried to lie. We could check their work later and they wonât be able to say âI didnât mean mostly like THATâ.
Yeah, Iâm digging this. Letâs make a new language thatâs a subset of our current one, and once enough of us agree on it, politicians will have an easier time not lying!
Is there a mic here? Iâd like to drop it now.
high fives self, injures back slightly
Plainspeak too easily becomes Newspeak.
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Wiktionary doesnât have citations-- and those are the OEDâs main draw.
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I have . . . too many resolutions to the broad scope of problems you just implied. This is exactly the opposite, and nobody had a method on top of this sort of thing before with an actual platform.
If you want to try tossing out something more specific perhaps? Or just come up with a few yourself? Look at your name! You donât need me for this!
Or is your name deceptive?? 
Is the mac version Universal or PowerPC only?
The OED is 22,000 pages; at $1 for 100 pages thatâs a bit more than $25. Still, it would be nice to have.
Everyone has access to all the information, but only some are allowed access to the index.
âThe new Bodleian Libraries 26m Book Storage Facility â archiving is incompatible with a world of digital scholarshipâ.
Trimmed caption misses the point of original statement. I was actually puzzled by it until Iâve read the whole phrase in the article. Can you tell your editors?
we could always just revert to actual English: Latish | The Anglish Moot | Fandom
The reason they do this is for legal reasons. Facts and basic information cannot be copyrighted. If they were to create digital copies and distribute them to the masses, anyone could copy that, and paste it into their own website, then monetize it â and that would be completely legal.
Since Oxford University does not want to lose their intellectual property they have this peculiar rental service. Just as an example, all the questions from first edition of Trivial Pursuit were gleaned from a single book. The author, who compiled them into one source, got no compensation for his efforts. It was deemed in court that he could not place copyright on facts, even if they were in his own words.
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And the thing is it would be legal too.
Exactly. And neither does the print edition. Just exchange the words Oxford English Dictionary in this article with Internet Access and all of a sudden you are confronted with the question, why doesnât anyone around here complain that hey canât own their Internet Access? or their lawyer? or just pay once and get all the Newspapers ever. A constantly updated dictionary is more like a service than an object like a traditional printed dictionary. We might just as well complain that that darn Wikipedia keeps asking for money.
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Amazon says that the compact edition, the one Cory linked to, has ~2400 pages. Thats the one with the microfiche sized text. I donât think it would scan well
My solution is to buy the print version, cheaply, at a second-hand bookstore. And my preference would not be the artificially condensed, (comes with a magnifier) version, but the old 28 volume set.
The reference to the Bodleian misses the point, because the Bodleian is not a free library.
Any person wishing to access any book in the many libraries that together make up âThe Bodâ, pays for that privilege, unless theyâre over the age of 65, or unemployed and receiving state benefits.
Iâm not in to renting books, even a constantly updated dictionary. While I can see how a kindle, etc would be useful for travel, I donât like the idea of publishers being able to delete something Iâve paid for because of internal decisions or because Iâve broken one of their obscure rules. Iâve kept up with technology and nobody has accused me of being backward or a Luddite but I think Iâll stick with paper books or ebooks which Iâve downloaded from my desktop onto a device that doesnât go online, thank you. Itâs not that I object to paying for electronic books. I object to renting them and I especially object to the power they have to delete information without my knowledge or consent.
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I do see your point, but the Oxford University Press is not Adobe, Time-Warner, or the gym; it is considered a charitable institution, and is exempt from corporation taxes in the UK and the US. Depending on how you count, the Pressâs mission, to print scholarly books for scholars as the publishing arm of the University, arguably goes back to 1478, or circa 1580, but it really and truly fully became a part of the University in the 1630s under Laud. I read Harry Carterâs fascinating history of the Press years ago, and remember being especially taken by the fact that it kept books in print (though not necessarily in new editions) from the seventeenth into the twentieth centuries. It was possible to purchase a brand new copy of certain works that had never exhausted, printed in the seventeenth century, well into the twentieth century. In other words, the OUP is very much a special case.
When the OUPâs fees for access to the standard and definitive English lexicographic work start to become onerous on institutions of learning (and that for me is the crux of Coryâs article), then something is fundamentally out of whack, because it was created to serve scholarship. The size of readership for a given work has never been an issue historically; it prints works on scholarly merit, by and large. It also prints well-prepared âpot-boilers,â works which do appeal to a broader audience, and I wonder if this has gradually created an environment at the press in which the profit motive is writ larger.
What a double-plus good idea!
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The caption under the photo gets Coryâs argument completely wrong: âarchiving is incompatible with a world of digital scholarship.â It leaves out the most important phrase: âThe Bodleian â indeed, the whole idea of archiving â is incompatible with a world of digital scholarship where renting is the only option.â The Guardian needs more careful blurb-writers.
