Responding to At de Lange in LO28271 --
...snip...
>Then in the middle eighties I discovered the Digestor. Within the wink of
>an eye, compared to the previous forty years of my life, I knew exactly
>what was happening. It took me less than forty days to work out the
>crucial details of the Digestor. You may find a report of this work at:
>The Digestor LO21272
> < http://www.learning-org.com/99.04/0167.html >
I'll take a look and let you know what I think.
...snip...
>Fred, as for your comment
>
> >Well, your remarks above drove me to my dictionaries
> >again (Websters 1861, 1868, 1910 and 1989).
>
>I wish I had the great OED here in my office or at home, perhaps on CD. I
>cannot run every time I want to make sure exactly when a word came into
>usage as well as its frequency because only the great OED gives that
>documentation. That is why the OED volumes stand a rack full as wide as my
>two arms can stretch. And once I open the OED, I get caught for many hours
>rather than finding out what I wanted to know and get back to my office
>;-)
>
>With tongue in the cheek:- Next time, when I suspect that you will get
>involved with a topic in which I had to use dictionaries, I will consult
>the very great OED. You might then feel impotent, experiencing what the
>complexity of the OED does to you ;-)
Not really; you see, I have a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
and I refer to it regularly. Back in 1994, my wife gave me a compact
version of the OED. At 2371 pages, not counting the bibliography, it is a
rather sizable but single volume in almost microscopic print on VERY thin
paper. It even came with its own little domed magnifying glass. This
compact version holds on each page what appears to be 9 pages of the
regular sized OED. This suggests to me that the full-size version runs a
little more than 20,000 pages and I doubt it's printed on paper this thin
so the notion that it occupies a rack full as wide as your two arms can
stretch does not surprise me.
Anyway, according to my OED, complex as an adjective, being more or less
synonymous with complicated or intricate, came into use in the middle
1600s. Complex (as a noun, referring to a complicated whole or assemblage
of parts) did not come into usage until the early 1700s and complexity a
few years later. The definitions in the OED are consistent with those
provided in lesser dictionaries; however, the OED also lists complex as a
verb, which does not show up in those lesser dictionaries.
Like you (i.e., with tongue in cheek), I suppose what we have here is a
complex complexity of complexes.
Regards,
Fred Nickols
740.397.2363
nickols@att.net
"Assistance at A Distance"
http://home.att.net/~nickols/articles.htm
--Fred Nickols <nickols@att.net>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <Richard@Karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>
"Learning-org" and the format of our message identifiers (LO1234, etc.) are trademarks of Richard Karash.