What a dictionary can do for you, therefore, is merely to tell you
whether in the past the word has been used with the signification which
you wish to give to it; but there are very few cases in which this will
be much help to you, for in an argument your only interest in the
meaning of a term is in the meaning of that term for the case under
discussion.
There are two quite different kinds of difficulty in putting the right
interpretation on a statement, and a dictionary can only remove one of
these, and by far the less important one. When you meet with a statement
containing an unfamiliar word--say, the word "parallax," or
"phanerogamous," or "brigantine"--and when you understand all the rest
of the statement except that word, then as a general rule the dictionary
will help to make the meaning clear. But when the difficulty is caused,
not by a word being unfamiliar, but by its being used in a certain
context, then the best dictionary in the world is, for your purpose, of
no use at all. The nature of every dictionary is necessarily such that
it entirely leaves out of account all doubts about meaning which are of
this second kind. The most that a dictionary can do is to tell us the
meaning of a word in those cases where the context in which it is used
is _not_ such as to make the meaning doubtful.
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