☝️🤓

Well, I didn’t say it would lead to anything good. I’m not an accelerationist and wouldn’t like to be one.

Just stop trying to make everything be about the US, for god’s sake.

I was aware that Eduard Limonov, a prominent Russian writer and national-bolshevik, did something of the sort. He admited Karadžić, deliberately looked to join him and then participated in the bombing of Sarajevo. Interesting to hear that people from elsewhere participated in such stuff too.

Because the 1200$ paywall they put behind the physical editions

From what I understood, that’s the price of used copies of the second edition these days, not how much it cost when it was actually published. I have no idea how I could estimate what’s the objectively appropriate price considering the funding, expenses and the production costs of such a dictionary, and I think neither do you.

particularly the SOED has some of the most well put together definitions of any dictionary for casual lookup

So you want SOED, not OED. SOED doesn’t cost $100 a year, it’s available as an Android app that costs a one-time $30 payment.

If your reaching for one the logic should be that you want the best/most accurate and descriptive one possible, no?

Not necessarily. OED’s entries can be so massive they’re difficult to navigate and follow, and the length of the definition doesn’t necessarily say much about its accuracy. The definitions in ODE and SOED are frequently more clear, perfectly adequate and faster to access and read through, e.g. if you’re reading Shakespeare or Milton and just want to quickly find the word’s meaning without all the additional scholarly apparatus distracting you. At least, such is my experience using dictionaries.

I strongly agree both with the idea that science should be freely available, and that it should be available as a local copy (PDFs, etc.). I also made my opinion on academic pricings in general and OED’s price in particular clear in one of the previous comments. I know full well that they’re not the only option, even in a capitalist society (many continental European academic institutions and Academies publish their major dictionaries, comparable in complexity to OED, online for free). The only thing I disagree with is singling out OED as if it’s doing something particularly unprecedentant and almost heinous.

They likely don’t want to publish it on CD or similar locally available (non-online) format because it’d easily get pirated. But, I say, maybe people should organise and pirate the existing database themselves.

Also, I don’t buy the “academic quality things should be incredibly expensive because its meant for scholars and university libraries” argument.

You don’t have to buy it, because I didn’t use the argument and never would.

It cost less to update a database or serve thousands of visitors than you might think especially for simple database lookups sent through https.

If you think OED’s expenses can be boiled down to updating the database and keeping the site online, it means you still don’t understand what OED is and how it is produced.

I get the impression you’re primarily looking to be infuriated (perhaps appropriate given the community, but still) rather than to talk about this seriously.

Unsurprisingly, it’s crap.

Well, you can use it to check spellings too. Medieval and early modern spellings, even. Sometimes when seeing pedantic people online correcting others’ spellings, I used to check OED and find old texts where the “misspelling” existed normally. Ideally the first editions of Shakespeare, with forms such as “scornfull” instead of scornful, etc. So the pedants would either have to admit it’s not such a big mistake, or Shakespeare was illiterate too.

Anyway, yeah it’s drama for its own sake.

OTOH the price is too high, but that’s normal for English academic publications in general. It’s a very rotten market that’s not really aimed at individual buyers but at university libraries.

Exactly, so why all the fuss about the inaccessibility of OED? Most people don’t need OED in particular, spellings and most relevant meanings can be checked in normal smaller dictionaries (although these days autocorrect solves most spelling problems before people would even think of checking a dictionary, and people even treat Google as a dictionary because it provides definitions when needed).

Not that the pricing isn’t awful and likely overblown, but that’s a different story.

You couldn’t do that, OED is so massive they’re not even printing it anymore. Old sets are on Amazon for $1000+

It’s weird to talk about “the dictionary”, there’s no single default dictionary, they’re all different and this is a dictionary for specialists. It’s a historical dictionary, so it covers words and their usage from up to a millenium ago (although IIRC it doesn’t include words that haven’t survived into Modern English, so 400-ish years ago).

This isn’t enshittification, it was always a paid service. The extortionate price is aimed at universities and is sadly typical for anglophone academic pricings.

Anyway, OED is useful for scholarly purposes. Most users need a normal, smaller dictionary, not OED-level of detail. That’s fulfilled by dicts such as Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate edition (at merriam-webster.com) and Oxford Dictionary of English (yes that’s different from Oxford English Dictionary).

If you really need OED, you can pirate the 2nd edition, since it was published as a program on CD. It’s on Rutracker, IIRC. Let me know if you can’t find it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2_r4q2imnQ

This article is linked on Russian Wikipedia: https://newpast.sfedu.ru/upload/iblock/831/NP_10_4_2018.pdf

Definitely keep them inside during the night, though, or even in the evening - the nighttime humidity can easily cause the pages to become wavy.

We’ve been looking at the ocean a whole lot, though.

How is it possible that this is the first orca birth in the wild that we’ve witnessed? Are they secretive when doing it?

Now that you put it like that, yeah, it really is completely normal to have “discriminatory” discounts (as a student I personally regularly make use of them), and for a moment I even wondered why it would bother me at all, why I even thought it is problematic - but as you say it’s the fact that it’s covert is what’s problematic.

Day 259 of Trump’s 24-hour peace deal: nuclear tests are resuming.

How the fuck is this even legal?