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The OED Toads, Damn Their Eyes
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Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Feb 2001
Status:
Offline
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The title of this rant describes the toads who publish the Oxford English Dictionary.
The web site describes the dictionary as the be-all and end-all of the English language, wherin one can trace to 1150 the origin of any word in the 500,000 listed, unless it was newly coined in 1151.
Anyone can purchase the print edition for $11 zillion (magnifying glass included) or the CD for $250. Anyone, that is, except Mac users.
Yes, friends, you too can pay $250 for a nut-browne warm-ale coaster, because those platform bigots hunched around their peat fires as Hansom cabs clatter past their coal-gas-lit stable cleverly outfitted with two � count them, two � chamber pots will not make a CD for anything but Bill Gates' atrocities.
Nor does Oxford have plans to produce CDs that will run on a Mac. The site proudly proclaims the CD will run on anything dating to a 200-megahertz Wintel. I can only surmise it would run on Babbage's Difference Engine, if only it wasn't so hard to find good help these days to crank the thing and keep it's brass fittings gleaming.
From what I have read about the original CD, it was to be avoided by even the Wintel blockheads, with it's near-useless interface, links that went nowhere and a purchase price exceeding the building costs of the Titanic, the wake of which it followed to the stygian depths. Obviously, the same group of pencil heads are still in charge.
"Thank you for your e-mail. We have no plans to produce a Mac version of the OED in the near future. . . ." is Oxford's reply to my quite-reasonable protest against this flat-Earth and numbingly stupid mindset.
The Empire is alive and well at the OED print shop and iron foundry. As are, I suspect, Microsoft's "gratuities," keeping the Mac shut out.
Bring on Webster and damn perfidious Albion to hell.
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Professional Poster
Join Date: Jan 2000
Status:
Offline
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There is a print version that does not require a magnifying glass. It's several volumes and is most often found at the reference desk at the library.
The one I use is here.
http://www.oed.com
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Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Feb 2001
Status:
Offline
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Thanks, Scott, but both print editions are a pain. I'm tempted to get the CD anyway because I have Virtual PC loaded on this thing, but there's a principal involved � extreme distate of Windows, and it's a colossal buttache running it. Besides, I think Macs are beyond the OED pale because of platform bigotry, combined with ivory-tower arrogance and plain old ignorance by the playing-fields-of-Eaton elite.
However, it would be interesting to see whether any names associated with the OED disk turn up with those of Encarta and other Redmond reference disks. After all, how difficult is it to port a data base from Windows to Mac?
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Feb 2000
Location: Sarasota, FL, US
Status:
Offline
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Hmmm... Disappointing. But, if you ever want to read a great book on the creation of the OED, get the 'Professor and the Madman.'
700 posts. Hooray!
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Mar 2000
Location: Reading, PA, USA
Status:
Offline
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Before you buy any version of the OED, print or CD, I'd wait until the new edition comes out. the "new" edition that came out a few years ago was really a travesty--about as new as a 200 MHZ Wintel machine  . But the forthcoming edition (I don't know off hand when it's supposed to be issued) is said to be a real reworking of the OED.
Now, whether you buy the new one when it comes out, or buy an old one at a cheaper price, you can't but win 
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And that's true too.--Shakespeare, King Lear
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