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All words are made-up: Do you think we find them fully formed on the ocean floor, or mine for them in some remote part of Wales?
A definition is an attempt to explain a word’s meaning using these certain conventions, and you have to distinguish between the definition of a word and the meaning of a word. The meaning is something that resides in the word, and the definition is a description of that. But a definition is an artificial thing.”
English has survived through conquest and adaptation, and many of those adaptations are blunt mistakes and misreadings. A living language made by fallible people will not be perfect, but it will occasionally make for remarkable reading.
Removing racial slurs from the dictionary will not eliminate racism; removing “injustice” from the dictionary will not bring about justice. If it were really as easy as that, don’t you think we would have removed words like “murder” and “genocide” from the dictionary already?
