Useful as they are, dictionaries are inadequate when we are trying to define certain intangibles. The words in the Oxford Concise may be correct as far as they go, but they sometimes cannot begin to convey the full picture. Try to define the word ‘character,’ for example. One can come at it from a number of angles, but because the condition rests on so many aspects, almost all of them subjective, a definition you can write down, even after laborious thought and revision,
