Life & Wisdom Quote by John Ralston Saul

A dictionary likes to cosplay as pure authority: clean fonts, tidy columns, no attitude. John Ralston Saul punctures that costume with a single barb, reframing the book we treat as neutral infrastructure as something closer to a well-organized editorial page. “Opinion expressed as truth” isn’t a cheap jab at definitions being wrong; it’s a reminder that deciding what a word means is a power move. Someone chooses which usages count, which are “informal,” which are “vulgar,” which get a note of disapproval, which communities are treated as sources and which as deviations.

The punchline lands because it targets a modern reflex: we outsource argument to reference. “Look it up” pretends to end debate, when it often just relocates it to the invisible room where lexicographers, publishers, and institutions negotiate standards. Alphabetical order becomes the perfect mask for ideology: the sequence feels mechanical, so the judgments inside it feel inevitable. Saul’s phrasing also catches the dictionary’s double life - it’s descriptive in theory, prescriptive in practice, especially in schools, courts, and media where definitions get weaponized to police “proper” speech.

Saul, a public intellectual obsessed with how societies launder authority through systems and expertise, is warning about epistemic complacency. The line doesn’t ask you to distrust dictionaries; it asks you to notice how quickly we treat curated consensus as natural law. The joke stings because it’s true enough to make you re-hear the smugness in your own “Actually, the definition is...”