See post 17. I’m not sure about most. The acclaimed Websters New World College Dictionary (4th ed, 2007) retains the historical ordering. And that ordering can vary from “Most popular usage”. Consider global: the first definition that comes to my mind is not, 1. “Round like a ball”. Rather it is, 2. of, relating to, or including the whole earth. Merriam Webster (a somewhat inferior product by a separate publisher, IMHO) also uses historical ordering.
Agreed. See post 29. The handmaiden metaphor was a popular one.
I’m curious about contemporary usages of the semi-archaic word “handmaiden”. Was the physicist being flippant? Is the implication “Assistant” as it is used in specific examples or “Joined at the hip?”. My perception is that the comic in post 25 captures modern perceptions.
Popper’s characterization is a useful way of thinking about and teaching science. And it is critical to have an ethic where empirical reality disciplines your concepts. Furthermore, it is appropriate to build in techniques that mitigate against the tendency to fool yourself: it is because people are not robotic logic processors that the scientific method is useful, even if only as a metaphor.
Descriptively, Popper’s framework has much to be desired: this has been understood by philosopher’s of science since at least Kuhn (1962). While there are more accurate descriptions of what actual scientists do, I’m not aware of a better or more heuristic definition of science than that encapsulated in the scientific method. “Progressive problem shifts” doesn’t cut it. So I’m sticking with Popper until I see something better (with caveats and acknowledgement of legitimate concerns). Then again, I haven’t looked at this stuff for years.
Perhaps my view is somewhat skewed by the dictionaries used in my field—namely, machine-readable ones. I work with computational word sense disambiguation (that is, given a word in context, how to make a computer determine which of the dictionary senses it’s being used in). The baseline algorithm is to assume the word’s being used in the first sense listed. For words which have more than one sense, this approach yields an accuracy of about 80%, which is empirical evidence that the first sense is indeed the most frequent one. Probably the most common dictionary which was historically used for such research was the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, though nowadays it’s been superseded by more liberally licensed resources such as Wiktionary and WordNet. Various Webster and Oxford dictionaries have also been used, though I’d have to check the papers to find out which ones.
I wasn’t present when the anecdote in question happened, but it was clear in context that the quoter equated use of the archaic term “handmaiden” with the image of a subordinate, socially inferior and specifically female assistant. This was done with intentionally sexist overtones, as a teasing joke rather than in earnest, since my wife is a mathematician and all the other people in the small group were male physicists.