April 01, 2008

What is a Definition Dynamo?

This is a person from either gender or role who takes one or several definitions from a dictionary that conveniently back up a point they are trying to make. I have a friend who calls these people vacuum professors as they require suspension of common sense and basic intelligence and a complete lack of grasps of how the real world operates in order for it to have any semblance of practical reality.

The ultimate classic example of this is of course the person who types out a definition of the word slave out of a dictionary. Those people are easy to spot and ignore.

My personal favorite example is people for whatever reason take an outdated clinical definition of the word fetish wanting to preach to all that a fetish can only be someone who is sexually dysfunctional because they can only obtain sexual satisfaction by something that is abnormal.

The reason why these types of definitions are useless is because they ignore the fact that many words have many different definitions and even more then a regular dictionary they might take on different definitions in a specific group of people like power exchange or some occupation. Then there is also the fact that often dictionaries are often behind the pace of the evolution of a word.

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