It is never Ok, OP/ED

[wiploc]

dictionary.com's first hit for militant is

A bit off topic but what's the deal with dictionary.com?

It's really handy, being right there on the internet.

It has the easiest name to remember.

Fundies quote it at me like its the be all and end all of dictionaries but many of its definitions are subtly different from other dictionaries and tend to be biased towards theists,

Biased how? I'd like some examples.

and once they've quoted it they won't accept any other definition, is dictionary.com made by theists for theists or something? I'd never heard of it until a theist started quoting it to me like it was the written word of god.

I'm an atheist, and I'm not aware of the bias. It has often been useful to me as I argued against theists.

either way it's a crap dictionary..

How do you figure?

On two occasions it's come thru for me when nothing else (including the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary) did.

Once, I was studying "The South," by Emma Lazarus. I could not make sense of the word "creole" in that context, until dictionary.com---and only dictionary.com---offered a meaning I was unfamiliar with: A creole is something transplanted, and that grows differently in the new location.

The other time was Shakespeare's Sonnet 29. I hadda look up "lark," and the various dictionaries, including the OED were not helpful. Here's Merriam Webster: "any of a family (Alaudidae) of chiefly Old World ground-dwelling songbirds that are usually brownish in color; especially : skylark — compare meadowlark." That sheds no illumination; it doesn't unlock the metaphor.

But dictionary.com, ah. After checking dictionary.com, I was able to write:

Dictionary.com tells us that "The European skylark, or lark of the poets (Alauda arvensis), is of a brown mottled color, and is noted for its clear and sweet song, uttered as it rises and descends almost perpendicularly in the air." In this tiny gem of an image, Shakespeare manages to convey the shift from earth to heaven; from the dark and drab ("sullen") colors of the lark's ground-nest shrouded still in night, to the bright colors of the already lighted sky; from the silence of the bird nesting, to the joyous song of bird in flight—and all in the time it takes the bird to burst vertically from the ground into the air. We even, by harking back to line three, get to go from crying to hymn singing, and from the hopeless ("bootless") position of one confronted with a distant and unresponsive heaven, to that of one who has approached heaven and finds that it has a gate (is enterable). How does this affect my reading of the poem? When the lark bursts from cover and our eyes follow it upwards from darkness to light, we find that how the world looks depends on how you look at it. Shakespeare may be suggesting that, regardless of our fortune, our fate, our regard in the eyes of men or heaven, we can make our own happiness in the blink of an eye by changing our approach to life.

So I'm curious as to what your complaint about dictionary.com is. For me it is the dictionary of first resort, and sometimes uniquely helpful.

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I've had Jews demand on websites they do not own that I don't spell out Yahweh as if their privates would magically burst into flames upon reading it.

Is that what it was? The time I ran across this, the Jew couldn't even use the word himself, so we couldn't figure out which word we were forbidden to use.