In his first edition (1795), Murray does go on, after a
semicolon, to list three examples: "man, virtue, London, &c." (p.
23).
Dwayne Strasheim
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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