ge in political
organization, or in a government or constitution; the overthrow or
renunciation of one government and the substitution of another, by the
governed." Such a definition would merely fill up your space, and leave
you no further ahead. A dictionary is studiously general, for it must
cover all possible legitimate meanings of the word; in an argument you
must be studiously specific, to carry your readers with you in the case
under discussion.

Moreover, words are constantly being pressed into new uses, as in the
case of "commission" (see p. 54); and others have entirely legitimate
local meanings. Only a dictionary which was on the scale of the New
English Dictionary and which was reedited every five years could pretend
to keep up with these new uses. In an unabridged dictionary dated 1907,
for example, the full definition of "amateur" is as follows: "A person
attached to a particular pursuit, study or science, as to music or
painting; especially one who cultivates any study or art, from taste or
attachment, without pursuing it professionally." Of what use would such
a definition be to you if you were arguing in favor of strengthening or
relaxing the amateur rules in college athletics, in which you had to
follow through the intricacies of summer baseball and of reimbursements
for training table and traveling expenses? Such a definition hardly
comes in sight of the use of the word which is most in the mouths of
college students in America. Words mean whatever careful and accepted
writers have used them to mean; and the business of a dictionary is so
far as possible to record these meanings. But language, being a living
and constantly developing growth, is constantly altering them and adding
to them.

What a dictionary can do for you, therefore, is merely to tell you
whether in the past the word has been used with the signification which
you wish to give to it; but there are very few cases in which this will
be much help to you, for in an argument your only interest in the
meaning of a term is in the meaning of that term for the case under
discussion.

There are two quite different kinds of difficulty in putting the right
interpretation on a statement, and a dictionary can only remove one of
these, and by far the less important one. When you meet with a statement
containing an unfamiliar word--say, the word "parallax," or
"phanerogamous," or "brigantine"--and when you understand all the rest
of the statement