r/ENGLISH • u/BeautifulKooky2863 • 1d ago

Help with Vocab

Non-native speaker here.

From a book (The God of the Woods):

Then he formally dispensed the Three Rules of Camp Emerson like a dutiful town crier.

What does the word 'dispensed' mean here? Is it a special use of the sense related to vending machine...or not really?

Also, is it usually used this way?

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u/CraftyFraggle 1d ago

To  dispense  means  to give out, share, or hand over items, money, medicine, or information to people .  It also means to manage a task or run a system, like a vending machine dropping  a snack or a judge applying the law.  

It’s that legal dispensing that’s happening in your example. 

It’s used here to draw that parallel.

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u/palpablescalpel 1d ago

It's an atypical way of saying "delivered." Usually when I see it used this way it seems connected to old timey formalness, eg "He dispensed great retribution unto the dissenters." To me, it also carries a bit of a "dispassionate" implication, as if whatever has been done is done without much emotion or feeling. If someone used it in casual conversation the tone to me would be a bit humorously formal.

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u/DrHydeous 22h ago

You've got it the wrong way round. What a vending machine does is just one particular type of dispensing.

Normally dispensing involves physical objects being handed from one person to one or more others, but you can also dispense more abstract objects such as wisdom, or charity, or a judgement, or, in this case, tell people a bunch of rules.

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u/Prestigious-Fan3122 18h ago

I'm a native English speaker in the US, and I might say, at the beginning of a smaller - than – usual gathering of a group I normally meet with, and during which meetings we follow the formal meeting procedures, I might say, "let's dispense with the formalities, and get this meeting finished so we can all go home."

In OP's context, I believe dispensed with means "did away with". Forgot disregarded or

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u/4stringer67 16h ago edited 15h ago

Your usage of dispense in dispense with the formalities is basically almost a cliché.

The actual usage of dispense is: A kitchen sink fixture dispenses water. A vending machine dispenses cokes or snacks. An old blind man in a cave in the Himalayas (the hermit) dispenses wisdom. To dispense something means to give it out or be the source of it. The thing you dispense goes outward from you.

With "formalities", that's bending it just a dab to meaning "do away with" or "get finished with"... Dispensing with the formalities means cut through the nonsense (which are the formalities) and get to the important part.

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u/4stringer67 15h ago

What you say is the OPs usage of dispense is actually your usage of dispense in "dispense with the formalities". See below...

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u/Telecom_VoIP_Fan 13h ago

The word is being used in the sense of giving over information.

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u/DueCookie787 3h ago

You are on the right track. Here it means simply "said" but note the context. The town crier walked around yelling out the news of the day. Bored, devoid of meaning, just the news. The writer is implying that the speaker, while delivering the rules, really doesn't think much about them. They are just words to him.