Trump says he has the best words. Merriam-Webster disagrees. [View all]

[Nitram]

The Miriam-Webster Dictionary has been tweeting amusingly snarky jabs at Trump since his election.

When John Dean of Watergate fame predicted “calamity” for Donald Trump’s presidency, Merriam-Webster’s official account tweeted about the prognostication, adding its definition: “an event that causes great harm and suffering.”

If you are unaccustomed to finding such information in the dictionary, you haven’t been keeping up with the new Merriam-Webster, which has been throwing the book — definition: “to punish (someone) as severely as possible” — at Trump.

fter Trump won the election, the dictionary announced that “lookups for ‘misogyny’ spiked after Trump’s victory” — and illustrated the tweet with a photo of Tic Tacs, a reference to Trump’s on-camera boasting about sexual assault.

Merriam-Webster has shown that a word can be worth 50,000 retweets, as when it responded to Conway’s “alternative facts” remark by saying: “A fact is a piece of information presented as having objective reality.” After Conway said she was uncomfortable being called a feminist, Merriam-Webster tweeted: “ ‘Feminism’ is defined as ‘the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities.’ ”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-says-he-has-the-best-words-merriam-webster-disagrees/2017/04/04/01eea7ac-1973-11e7-855e-4824bbb5d748_story.html?utm_term=.78361032f97d