Meantime: does Babelfish come in an OED version?
There’s an online listing for a silk/cashmere laceweight yarn, shipped from China, and where it should mention care instructions it has the rather marvelous sentence, and I quote exactly, “Abstersion explain:handwash in cold water and dry flat”. I looked up abstersion at dictionary.com and it defines it as to wipe clean or to clean, from Sir Walter Scott.
So Walter Scott made up some random word forever ago, being, you know, novel, and some poor guy in China is trying to use it to communicate?
I told Michelle there was this weird word and she, always up for a vocabulary challenge, looked it up on Merriam-Webster’s site–where they said, well, that’s not in our regular online dictionary, but if you pay for our super-duper advanced version, then we can indeed tell you what it means. But it is secret knowledge, with initiation writes involved, a real fee-for-all. (Or words to that effect. I’m translating.)
She was stunned, going, “I have *never* seen that before on their page! NEVER!” It was like the old Google game where you try to come up with a search that gets you only one result on the page–I won!
So how on earth did this guy in China get a hold of that word and think it was the right one?
And now we’ll just, I guess, absterge that useless word from our vocabularies? (I just made it real easy to, huh?) My computer’s spellcheck Does Not Approve. That’ll teach it.