Reply to thread

Message: [QUOTE="tzznandrew, post: 3870046, member: 168"] I mean, yeah. Fundamentally I don't like using a dictionary because it's an appeal to authority that seems to most as if it were authoritative when it isn't necessarily so. Something like the OED takes multiple snapshots of how a word is used at a given time. It's not telling us what [I]drown[/I] [U]must[/U] mean in usage, just what it has. From the moment after the snapshot has been taken the word may begin its drift to newer or more subtle uses. Happens all the time. Especially since the definitions are tied to media in some way (has to appear in print/radio/tv/internet) and not the way people may use it in spoken vernacular, often in nonstandard or nonliteral ways like this, certain meanings and uses get lost. Still, if we want to resort to the OED (which I think is unnecessary), there seems to be a perfectly reasonable usage that fits what he said attested in the Wycliffe Bible, Fanny Burney, and Dickens' [I]Nickelby[/I] among others (II.3.b). The attestation from Robert Pollock's [I]The Course of Time[/I], published in 1827, of "He drowned himself in sleep, / In wine" hardly reads any different than "If we lose out to Duke in making the field, I will drown myself in hot sauce and puke on Coach K" because in both cases we know the speaker is alive. So, I guess I should say that I think fighting over the precise meaning of a word in most contexts is a complete waste of time. There's a sphere of meaning that most accept, and provided the usage falls within that it's not really a useful or interesting debate beyond pedantry. We all understood what he meant because he used the term in the general sphere of meaning we're familiar with. [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach