Like Precious Little Snowflakes

Jeffrey Lord, a writer at the American Spectator has concluded that Shirley Sherrods lied about her father being lynched. Yes, her father was brutally beaten to death by a mob on the courthouse steps. But "lynching", we're told, requires a rope -- otherwise, it's just "a brutal and fatal beating," and an outright fabrication to say otherwise.

Needless to say, this doesn't track anybody's definition of "lynching", which generally refers to an extrajudicial execution by a mob (the Israeli commandos who claimed that the crew of the Mavi Marmara was preparing to lynch them were not referring to ropes). And consequently, it seems like virtually everybody is coming down on Lord -- from Matt Yglesias and Jeff Fecke to Radley Balko and Lord's own colleagues at The American Spectator.

But Paul Campos managed to nutpick a gem from a commenter trying, desparately, to defend Lord's statement:

Regardless of the dictionary’s definition, English is considered the most nuanced of languages because each word has a specific, unique meaning giving context and emotion to any written or spoken idea or statement. I don’t need a dictionary to instruct me on the accepted meaning of the word ‘lynching.’

That is so, so far from an accurate description of English that it nearly defies belief. Words in English rarely have just one specific meaning, and the idea that the word "lynching" tends to evoke a noose doesn't mean a extrajudicial mob killing isn't a lynching, any more than the classic image of a "picnic" occurring on a grassy field would mean someone is liar if their "picnic" occurred on a craggy mountain ledge.