Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)
Geoff Barnbrook: From description to prescription and back again
3. Not real; not true; allegorical; made by prosopopoeia FICTITIOUSLY. Falsely; counterfeitly. The list of meanings given for 'fickle' sense 1 is of interest. Although they are all close in meaning to each other, they are not precisely synonyms. The user of the dictionary is being given a range of associated meanings, all recognisably within the same semantic area, with no indication of a method for differentiating between them. This method is widely used in the other definitions in the sample. Its effect is to give a series of roughly substitutable equivalents of the headword, leaving users to disambiguate from their own knowledge of normal contexts. A comparison with some modern dictionaries might be useful. CCELD (p.529) gives two senses: 1. Someone who is fickle keeps changing their mind about what they like or want; 2. If a wind or the weather is fickle, it changes often and suddenly. The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Contemporary English (OALDCE , Cowie (1989a)) has only one entry (p.450): often changing; not constant which echoes Johnson's list of undifferentiated meanings, although in the usage examples given for the word it includes: a fickle person, lover etc., i.e. not faithful or loyal The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE , Summers (1987)) manages to cover both the CCELD senses together in one definition (p. 377): likely to change suddenly and without reason, esp. in love or friendship Hanks (1987, p. 120) describes the tendency of Johnson and later lexicographers to construct lists of approximately substitutable terms as the 'multiple-bite' strategy. In terms of Johnson's avowed aims it may be a reasonable thing to do. Johnson is, after all, simply trying to describe the range of meanings over which a word's use is valid. For a modern learner's dictionary such a method seems unhelpful and uninformative, but the legacy of Johnson and his predecessors is obviously very powerful. 25
