[…] the linguist-lexicographer’s object of description can be nothing less than the entire vocabulary of a language (or, more precisely, some finite stock of “lexemes” and productive derivation and compounding patterns) [...].
- Weinreich (1958), a pag.349

ATTENTION, LEXICOGRAPHERS. When a linguist turns to lexicography, he becomes a descriptive semanticist, whose purpose is to list the words of a language and to “state their meanings”. But it is an open secret that the linguist-lexicographer is a scientist with a bad conscience, for he has not yet found a way of performing his task in a completely reasoned, verifiable manner […].
- Weinreich (1958), a pag.346