Tom's Notes—Wordsmiths

I don't know about you, but when I need to check a word my first port of call is always The Free Dictionary online. So I was surprised it didn't get a mention in the Guardian's Online dictionaries: which is best?

Strange.

Reading through the talkback on the above article, I was chastened by how many snooty wordsmiths there are. There's even a word for them: prescriptivists. I prefer "snooty."

Though the free dictionary serves my casual purposes, there are times when I have to be 100% sure (and a little bit snooty) about a word—that's when the Merriam-Webster Collegiate and Oxford Concise come out. 9 times out of 10, I find the free dictionary still had it right.

Sometimes though, I disagree with all three.

Rather than being a prescriptivist or a descriptivist—I like to think of myself as a pragmatist. And I mean this in the best traditions of Wittgensteinian thinking. Ultimately, what we've decided words mean trumps dictionary definitions. Because what we say is more important than what we write.

I'll tell you why: written words are artificial. You don't think in letters; you think in vowels and consonants, in sounds. With a voice not a keypad. Writing is an invention that humans are still trying to build-in to the species: reading and writing have to be taught at school, but there's no class for learning how to vocalize—that's instinctive. Watch a young child learning to read, what are they taught to do? Read out the words. Older children may not engage the voice, but you still see their mouth silently annunciating. It holds true all the way to adulthood: the most important thing to a writer is his voice not his pen—he knows you are listening to him and not just scanning glyphs on a page.

The spoken word is like the flesh around the muscle and bone of cognition's hand. Written words are like a glove over the hand. Think of getting your keys out and opening the front door with gloves on—not easy is it. Same thing with written communication.

So what we say has more credence than what we write. The phrase "there's a few problems" doesn't cause any problems in conversation; but write it down and suddenly problems appear. I'm sympathetic to arguments that orthodoxy for phrases like "there's a few problems" debases the language—but this puts the cart before the horse.

Nevertheless, there's no denying the importance of dictionaries to human communication.

So which one is your favourite?