[Delacon]

Websters OED fight! Lol.

[freedumb2003]

>>Websters OED fight! Lol.<<

Somehow I picture a “Far Side” cartoon with 2 professors swinging hard-bound dictionaries at each other ;)

[dr_lew]

Webster's has always bent freely to usage. My own losing battle is for the original meaning of ad hominem, which is almost universally understood today as implying a personal attack. This is meaning 2 in Webster's Ninth Collegiate, but not listed in Webster's Seventh Collegiate. The first ( and only in the Seventh ) meaning is given as, "appealing to a person's feelings or prejudices rather than his intellect". You see it's "TO the man" not "AGAINST the man". I've always thought that the usual understanding is based on a vulgar misapprehension of the latin.

But even the definition in the Seventh is a liberalization of the original which just means an argument tailored to a particular audience. Galileo and Clausewitz use it in this sense. Here's Clausewitz:

We see then that there are many ways to one's object in War; that the complete subjugation of the enemy is not essential in every case; that the destruction of the enemy's military force, the conquest of the enemy's provinces, the mere occupation of them, the mere invasion of them--enterprises which are aimed directly at political objects--lastly, a passive expectation of the enemy's blow, are all means which, each in itself, may be used to force the enemy's will according as the peculiar circumstances of the case lead us to expect more from the one or the other. We could still add to these a whole category of shorter methods of gaining the end, which might be called arguments ad hominem.