Plague Words and Phrases. How to Write Strong Arguments at The CreateDebate Blog. Ambiguous Words. Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric. Searching for the best dictionary. - By YiLing Chen-Josephson. It can be a challenge to get at what sets a dictionary apart from its peers. First, you have to move beyond the marked family resemblance (thumb index tabs, speckled pages, and a preference for the name Webster), the swaggering jacket copy ("The most useful dictionary you can own," "The most up-to-date dictionary available," "America's favorite dictionary," etc.), and the shrink-wrap put in place to encourage you and your grubby hands to judge a book by its cover alone. Then you must read indefatigably through scads of introductory material and reference supplements, weigh the merits of different line drawings of jerboas and lazy tongs and the like, and, above all, look up words you know over and over again.
I, unencumbered by gainful employment and needing to be kept off the streets, am the very definition of a person up for this challenge. Before I tell you the results of my tests, there are some hard questions you should ask yourself about what it is that you want from a dictionary. The Bertrand Russell Society - Russell Texts Online.