they had a cartoon of a miriam webster picking up the phone saying, the editor ain't in. ten years later the furor died down, and today description is considered the norm, and webster himself says this, quoting cicero, the norm of language is usage, and if sarah palin uses refudiate enough, someone like webster might be schemish when squash schemish when he hears it the first time but he has to stick it in the edition area. webster would describe language and prescribe how to live. so some of his religious beliefs were in the dictionary, and the miriam webster company would take out these personal references, calls james webster a born definer, they also -- they had this crisis, and i crooked at the corporations at yale, and there was a crisis because they realized the etymology was way off base and they were worried the dictionary would lose its market share if they didn't fix it. they hire a guy from germany, and take the etymologies out. one point i want to leave you with is this dictionary, the 1864 dictionary, was the best dictionary of the 19th 19th century, and webs