Usefulness of Dictionaries

Opening a dictionary to find out the meaning of an English word might indeed be an elementary student’s choice, but, if used as a methodology for settling scientific and philosophical discussions, I am afraid, it is a rather poor choice. Imagine a physicist living around the turn of the last century doing something similar when Einstein formulated his special theory of relativity. “Oh! I say,” we can imagine this physicist saying, “The New Collegiate defines ‘mass’ as an invariable property of an object, and this chap from the Patent Office calls it a variable!” I suppose one should be grateful to Einstein that he relied less on Webster to solve scientific problems.

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