Speaking of beef, I didn't know what 'kine' meant until I checked it up with my Sony Reader
Real life dictionaries can be incomplete or just a hassle to use sometimes! Well, to be exact, this one is *more* complete than my little real-life Collins dictionary at home. It still doesn't know a word or two (at the least).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Worldwalker
I don't have a beef with dictionaries. I own many, in several languages, both general-purpose and various specialized ones (medical, legal, etc.). I have a beef with GrouchoM, or at least with the way he responded to my first post.
I said I saw no need for one as an essential feature in an ebook reader -- specifically, I thought it was thrown in as an added feature to justify the price -- and GrouchoM decided that was a reason to insult me, suggest that I'm lying about not needing a dictionary at my fingertips whenever I read, sneering about how anyone who doesn't need such a dictionary must have every word in the English language memorized, etc.
And you are doing no better. "Why do you want to restrict education?" I'll answer that when you tell my whether you've stopped beating your spouse yet.
I use my ebook reader almost entirely for pleasure reading -- specifically, to read fiction. I do not need to use a dictionary for that. If someone else does, a dictionary would be useful to them. Here is precisely what I said:
I said nothing about education. I said nothing about people not using dictionaries. Note that I said I, I, I, I -- I'm not talking about what anyone else needs or doesn't need, I'm talking about my own personal experience and my need, or lack thereof, for a dictionary while reading for pleasure, and how, as a result of that experience, I feel about dictionaries as features of ebook readers. My freaking opinion. It seems unnecessary to me to have a dictionary on my ebook reader because it's not a feature I would be likely to use. If you can't read without a dictionary, buy an ebook reader that has one. That's why they make them. But I, me, myself, yo, moi, the person sitting at this computer typing right now, *I* do not see it as an essential feature.
Maybe most people have to have dictionaries next to them when they read; I don't know, because the only people whose reading habits I'm familiar with are those of my extended family. They seem to read without needing to look words up all the time. I wasn't trying to report on some comprehensive survey of people's dictionary-while-reading needs. I said *I* saw no need for one, and felt that it was just an added feature thrown in by manufacturers because they could. As I said, to give the feature-counting reviewers something to count.
And I still don't think they're very useful in an ebook reader. At least, not unless they're the OED (and you don't need to look up "siphon").
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