----- Original Message ----
From: Edgar Schuster <
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To:
[log in to unmask]Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2008 12:28:13 PM
Subject: Re: Anthimeria: Hell in a handbasket
Bill (and others),
For what it's worth---and I'm not sure it's worth much---I have a Murray definition of noun as "the name of any thing that exists, or of which we have any notion." Lowth wrote "the Name of a thing; of whatever we conceive in any way to subsist, or of which we have any notion."
Maybe this comment from Otto Jespersen is worth a lot more: "If there is one thing I dislike in grammar, it is definitions (of parts of speech) too often met with in our textbooks. They are neither exhaustive nor true;
they have not, and cannot have, the precision and clearness of the definitions found in textbooks of mathematics . . . . And thus we might go on to the definitions found even in the best grammars: they are unsatisfactory, all of them, and I do not think they are necessary."
The English Journal [!!!], 1924
Ed Schuster
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