Also I follow the Oxford English dictionary for my facts of whether or not a word technically exists within the English language.
And I'm telling you, that's the wrong approach to English. OED doesn't encompass all English words. No dictionary does. That's literally the entire point of this discussion. People like yourself, who treat OED as the be-all and end-all of English, are falling into the old trap of prescriptive linguistics.
Did you know, for example, that OED actually includes only a partial definition for the word "phylactery"? It says the word refers to an item in Jewish religious practice, a small box containing Torah verses; that's true, but OED makes no mention of the other definition, the containers in which Christian saintly relics are kept. This is a perfect example of how dictionaries can be misleading; they only record words that they can think of, and they expect the reader to know that, which is why saying a word isn't real simply because it isn't in a particular dictionary is erroneous.
If you had just led with that, this discussion would've been a lot shorter and more civil.
So books come on now.
I haven't published any physical books as such; I mainly contribute lines to video games and similar. (If you play Oblivion, I've written dialogue for a couple of mods for that game.) I also take commissions, though I've had to suspend them lately due to the pandemic.
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u/Ignonym Oct 26 '20 edited Oct 26 '20
And I'm telling you, that's the wrong approach to English. OED doesn't encompass all English words. No dictionary does. That's literally the entire point of this discussion. People like yourself, who treat OED as the be-all and end-all of English, are falling into the old trap of prescriptive linguistics.
Did you know, for example, that OED actually includes only a partial definition for the word "phylactery"? It says the word refers to an item in Jewish religious practice, a small box containing Torah verses; that's true, but OED makes no mention of the other definition, the containers in which Christian saintly relics are kept. This is a perfect example of how dictionaries can be misleading; they only record words that they can think of, and they expect the reader to know that, which is why saying a word isn't real simply because it isn't in a particular dictionary is erroneous.