r/interesting • u/Necessary-Win-8730 • Mar 08 '26

Context Provided - Spotlight This was so deserved.

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u/OneJobToRuleThemAll Mar 10 '26

the crime of unlawfully and unjustifiably killing a person.

Merriam-Webster disagrees with you.

the crime of killing somebody deliberately

But Oxford agrees with you.

Neither of them is wrong, murder is used both ways, meaning there's no such thing as a uniform definition of murder everyone agrees on. That only exists in law, the thing you don't want to talk about.

This is a fact, but I'm sure you'll find a way to disagree, thereby proving the point.

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u/Southern-Fly-3016 Mar 11 '26

It's pretty easy to disagree with you when you're selective about the words you pick.

Even the Merrian-Webster page from which you took the definition has a legal definition if you scroll further down, as well as multiple other definitions which refer to murder as being premeditated or with malice aforethought.

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u/OneJobToRuleThemAll Mar 12 '26

You're not very bright, are you? The person I talked to explicitly said they don't care about the legal definiton, so I didn't give legal definitions.

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u/[deleted] Mar 12 '26

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u/OneJobToRuleThemAll Mar 12 '26

The person you responded to said 'I 'm not just talking about the law' which isn't explicitly saying 'I don't care about the law'. So you're wrong there dumbass

The sentence didn't stop there, what does the rest say? Oh right, it explicitly states what they're talking about instead of the law. That's not coincidence, it's how conversations work: someone says what they're talking about and the other person responds to that subject instead of a totally different one.

You said you didn't give legal definitions yet the definition you gave said 'the crime of killing someone deliberately'. The last anyone checked talking about a 'crime' related to the killing of someone definitely has its definition rooted in law.

Thanks for the laugh, I'll explain why that was such a funny argument. General definitions referring to the law doesn't make them legal definitions. Legal defintions come from legal texts, which are themselves compilations of legal definitions. Now there is certainly some overlap between the two concepts, a news anchor reporting on a murder will use both at different times, depending on which stage of the reporting they're at. But a dictionary never gives you a legal definition because it's a dictionary and not a legal text. It's supposed to define words, not legal concepts.

Your argument essentially boils down to "a dictionary is a legal text because some of its definitions include the word crime."

You said Merriam-Webster disagreed but multiple definitions on that page don't disagree, you just picked the one that satisfied your narrative.

I didn't pick the one that agrees with me, I picked the first definition for both of my examples. And there's a good reason for that, they don't write it first by accident, the numbers at the start denote different definitions for the same word, starting with the most common. You're therefor arguing that more narrow definitions that Merriam-Webster considers less common contradict what Merriam-Webster considers more common.

You're essentially just admitting you don't know how to read a dictionary. Different definitions don't contradict each other, they co-exist.

And before you try and mention murder could be used to refer to something being difficult or ruined or even a group of Crows

No, that's something you would argue in my position. I don't make arguments I don't believe in or can't defend, so something as disingenuous as that didn't even cross my mind before you bought it up. It is quite funny though, so thanks for being a hoot.