Of course my statement was ridiculous. I was imitating what passes for lefty reasoning. Your own writing is similarly ridiculous.

But I was being ridiculous on purpose to make a point.

Apparently, you’re still not catching on.

Maybe if we try to address you guys in your own language, you can understand better.

When you take a safe place like a thesaurus and assualt us with your liberal propaganda in a context in which we expect dispassionate fact, we feel violated. It’s harassment to not allow us to enjoy the diversity of our own opinions in a simple reference work. We want a thesaurus with example sentences that looks like America. Our experience tells us that liberals in positions of power at Thesaurus companies rape our vocabulationist sensibilities with their hate speech. Who are you to tell us that our experience is less valid than yours, dude. You’ve got real anger issues. Perhaps some diversity training or a consciousness raising circle would improve your karma.

Does that help a little Jim?

I think what offends me the most about the Iraq propaganda in the Thesaurus was how heavy handed and obvious it was. And as frgough points out, it’s not even true.

That’s just silly. Apple DID NOT write this dictionary or the thesaurus. I guarantee it. Writing such reference works is very laborious, very specialized, and way outside Apple’s area.

Oxford wrote that line (or someone Oxford hired). Period.

There is no doubt. It takes years to make a real dictionary or thesaurus. Folks like Oxford and AmHer and Webster’s made their core dictionaries years ago, and merely maintain and expand them now.

(And the point of thesaurus quotes is to show current usage. NOAD is a dictionary that sells itself as VERY current, so they almost certainly chose Iraq in that sentence because of it’s currency.)