India following facist model according to Indian author 1724

On Fri, 25 Aug 2006, alexy

1. I guess you just don't remember the example I gave some months ago where I looked up, in a medium sized collegiate dictionary, the word Hinduism and the definition was something like "that which is practiced by a Hindu" and when I looked up the word Hindu, in the same dictionary, it said something like "a person who practices Hinduism". Real useful, eh?

2. The fact that there are many kinds of dictionaries, for different contexts, such as slang dictionaries, word usage dictionaries, legal dictionaries, medical dictionaries, technical dictionaries, and funny "dictionaries" such as thesauruses (not sure on the spelling) that can sometimes help a person understand word meanings better than a dictionary, surely escapes you, doesn't it.

3. As a matter of fact, in and among all of the people I have run across in my whole life, the idea of looking up something in a dictionary for other than spelling purposes seems to be mostly pursued by little gnats that want to argue over picayune trivia instead of be concerned with communications and the larger context within which the word was embedded. And, in my own experience, most of the time when I have looked in the dictionary for a definition to help me understand the word and the sentence-paragraph it is in, I have been disappointed by the definition or the particular definition was surely not been what the author meant.

4. Now lets look, again, at what you wrote above and let everyone else see the core of the sneaky little trick you tried to pull off: quoting out of context.

Here is most of that context (and all of the relevant part):

*********************

Any business can be called a profession. If you like, you can put quote marks on it. It all depends on the definition. Actual everyday word usage (not the dictionary) allows for this: "professional back robber."

***************** end of context *********** Apologizing for my misspellings and typos (I meant to say "professional bank robber"), let's review YOUR dictionary definition above (go ahead and just scroll up now, look, and come back here).

OK, since you like dictionary control-freak authority and in your own way, here is Kamal's wikipedia definition (that he used to show me he could look up URLs rather than focus on my message: -------------- Profession

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search This article or section does not cite its references or sources. You can help Wikipedia by introducing appropriate citations.

This is the article about work professions. For religious professions, see Profession (religious).

A profession is an occupation that requires extensive training and the study and mastery of specialized knowledge, and usually has a professional buttociation, ethical code and process of certification or licensing. Examples are accounting, law, teaching, architecture, nursing, medicine, finance, the military, the clergy and engineering.

Clbuttically, there were only three professions: ministry, medicine, and law. These three professions each hold to a specific code of ethics, and members are almost universally required to swear some form of oath to uphold those ethics, therefore "professing" to a higher standard of accountability. Each of these professions also provides and requires extensive training in the meaning, value, and importance of its particular oath in the practice of that profession.

Sociologists have been known to define professionalism as self-defined power elitism or as organised exclusivity along guild lines, much in the sense that George Bernard Shaw characterised all professions as "conspiracies against the laity". Sociological definitions of professionalism involving checklists of perceived or claimed characteristics (altruism, self-governance, esoteric knowledge, special skills, ethical behavior, etc.) became less fashionable in the late 20th century.

----end of partial quote-------

That "definition" went on much farther but clearly showed that YOUR favored definition left out a great deal of useful and relevant peripheral meanings and circumstances. I avoid the (simple) dictionary definitions for that reason. They are arguable, insufficient, and often trivial (the Hindu-ism problems) or wrong.

I called all three, prosbreastution and spying and landlording, "professions." I know prosbreastution has been often referred to as "the oldest profession" and spying has been often referred to as "the second oldest profession" and you would not get that from either your dictionary definition or the wikipedia definition and I just put landlording earlier since it is a business (pay for use) and required some kind of special "power" to be developed over the many renters-tenants to develop a revenue stream which is out of proportion to the work involved. Once the scheme is set up, the landlord sits on his butt and rakes in tons of money with little or no work (very much like today's corporate CEOs).

Its only a small jump from a "profession" where the arrangement is "pay for use" to "pay for service" of prosbreastutes and spys and identifies an occupation with great earning potential. The wikipedia definition even started to acknowledge that sociologists use "profession" with additional nuances. And, I'm using my author's "artistic licence" for more. In ancient times where there are written records, the landowners with the greatest amount of land were so rich that I would bet they might be making more to much more money than the most wealthy courtesans and the marriage laws of those times were set up to keep all that money within families adn family lines. Some of the Roman emperors and some of the richest landowners in ancient Rome who owned land were calculated (by Durant) to be worth $30-$100 mil in 1950s USD (throw in inflation and in terms of 2006, these guys were nearly comparable to the likes of Bill Gates, and the net worths of the richest guys in the USA), and somewhere estimated to have had up to 5,000+ slaves working on their farm lands. But, landlording does not get the historical interest that spying and (high clbutt) prosbreastution get maybe because its a comparatively boring job. But it sure looked like Julius Caesar was buttbuttinated (44 BC) because he was going to start taking from the rich and giving to the poor but the rich just wanted to get richer (i.e. they favored expansion of the empire).

As a comparison, the tax income of the king of ancient Babylon (a walled city about 1 km square), according to records found in the clay tablets, included some 30,000 cattle and some 340,000 sheep. In terms of todays valuation, this quanbreasty of animals amounted to the equivalent of a very large amount of money.

But, you wouldn't be interested in or fascinated by any of that because you are so lost in your precious little dictionary. Typical-miss the forest for the trees.