It always comes as a shock to our correspondents that the dictionary is not a book most holy and inviolate, delivered unto us from On High, verily divine. It is written by real, live, completely fallible human beings. These human beings have been known, while proofreading 2,000 pages of 4-point type, to miss a thing or two. There is no need to panic: the English language is not falling all to hell simply because I yawned at 6:00pm two days before the manuscript had to be at the typesetter’s and therefore missed “falllible.”
A book once pointed out that it was odd that we say "the dictionary" and not "a dictionary", and noted that another example of this was "the bible". I suspect "the telephone book" might fit in this category too...
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Date: 2012-02-18 04:10 pm (UTC)It always comes as a shock to our correspondents that the dictionary is not a book most holy and inviolate, delivered unto us from On High, verily divine. It is written by real, live, completely fallible human beings. These human beings have been known, while proofreading 2,000 pages of 4-point type, to miss a thing or two. There is no need to panic: the English language is not falling all to hell simply because I yawned at 6:00pm two days before the manuscript had to be at the typesetter’s and therefore missed “falllible.”
A book once pointed out that it was odd that we say "the dictionary" and not "a dictionary", and noted that another example of this was "the bible". I suspect "the telephone book" might fit in this category too...