The writing of a dictionary… is not a task of setting up authoritative statements about the “true meanings” of words, but a task of recording, to the best of one’s ability, what various words have meant to authors in the distant or immediate past. The writer of a dictionary is a historian, not a lawgiver… To regard the dictionary as an “authority,” therefore, is to credit the dictionary writer with gifts of prophecy which neither he nor anyone else possesses.