ABSTRACT
A study of the changing meanings of words repays the attention of anyone interested in design standards and regulations. For instance, in an early edition of Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) the word truth had a fixity and authority about it. Webster defined it as “conformity to fact or reality; exact accordance with that which is, or has been, or shall be.” By 1997, truth had acquired a more socially rooted definition. The MerriamWebster Collegiate Dictionary included truth as “a judgement, proposition, or idea that is true or accepted as true.” The American Heritage Collegiate Dictionary (2000) concurred: truth is “a statement proven to be or accepted as true.”
