RE: OED

["Michael Norman" michael.norman@xxxxxxxx]

J R Fox Wrote:

>You know, I've probably read through that site about twice a year, and
*still* never
>really managed to digest some of the key information. I kept thinking that
I'd have to
>locate a really old version (1.13 ?) of the CD, and these don't seem to be
easy to find.
>If in fact you are summarily stating that we can "have it all" with V.4,
with no residual
>advantages to the early versions, I think you may have cut to the chase for
me here,
>and that will be good news.

Jordan-I'm not sure what you mean by "no residual advantages to the early
versions." V4 gives you the 7,000 words they added since 1.1, but, as Robert
points out somewhere, 1.1 is the core of the dictionary. I don't want to get
into an argument on lexicostatistic provenance or supremacy. Old, indeed, is
sometimes better (I have an onion-skin paper 11th edition of the
Encyclopedia Britannica and the articles are fabulous, whereas the new
Britannica has really been dumbed down.) I had been using the OED online
through the university, but it took me lots of clicks to get through the
layers of proxy servers and authentication, and, then, of course, the system
was sometimes down -- exactly when I needed to look something up quickly.
I'm on a Win7/64 machine. I do not use Xywrite anymore (my co-author simply
refused to continue with it); I have NB, which is fine for many things, but
frankly it's a pain in XP Mode on this machine, so I'm waiting for the
32-bit version. I do a lot of my writing in MSWord -- all the student papers
I have to read and all the research articles I edit for colleagues at the
medical center are in Word. I'm getting used to it...sort of. With OED4
running in the background, you can simply double click a word in many
programs (Word, Acrobat, others) and it will look it up. The dictionary
interface is fine, not a work of art to be sure, but easy to work with.
Robert has lots of instructions for integrating it with other programs and
networking it. I've got it in my startup file to run minimized on bootup.
I'm very pleased. One caveat: follow Robert's instructions on how to avoid
SecuRom. Simple and effective. It's a very good tool.

Michael Norman