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Tristanjohn -> (10/24/2003 1:05:31 AM)
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[QUOTE=pasternakski]Uncited 1907 sources don't impress me. Definition number one is merely a popular, inartful use of a specific term from another field of endeavor.[/QUOTE]
I have Webster's Third, both on my shelf and on my HD. The same basic definition for "minimalsim" is given there. If one reaches back inside older dictionaries then a more "conventional" definition will be found; and so we find in Webster's New World Dictionary (The World Publishing Company, Cleveland and New York, 1953) for Minimalist "1. a member of the right wing of the (former) Russian Social Revolutionaries. 2. a Menshevik (sense 1). Opposed to Maximalist.
But that's a somewhat truncated and dated usage for our purpose. Languages either grow and develop or they die. Our language, the English language, lives and prospers accordingly. For all I know even newer usages of these terms are being employed somewhere as I write this piece, and as dictionaries can only serve us as history books we might not discover these new uses for a number of years to come; yet if and when these uses gain common acceptance in speech and writing then they, too, in the fullness of time will find themselves formally incorporated into that greater lexicon and toolbox of thought expression known the world over as English.
And that's just the way it is, Pasternakski.
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