Is The Oxford English Dictionary one of the "covered agreements." ?

In its recent post on  Posner and the Rule of WTO Law,  Simon Lester underlines that the “mere mention of "policy preferences" seems to set people in the WTO on edge. This stems from a  fact long ago underlined by Hudec that WTO  activity intrudes upon domestic regulatory sovereignty and leaves therefore WTO legal institutions particularly exposed to damaging criticism from national governments that do not yet fully accept the WTO's authority in this area. Recognizing this very exposed position, the Appellate Body may well have concluded that the safest refuge from political criticism was to stay as close as possible to the shelter of the legal texts accepted by governments. This “ textualism” strategy has led to an excessive use of dictionaries in order to discover the “ordinary meaning” of terms. There is even the joke that the Oxford English Dictionary is now one of  the “covered agreements”!

However, in the vein of what Posner says, this “textualism-dictionary” strategy,  cannot be viewed only as a  the search for “pure” textual meaning. Rather, as John Greenwald pointed out, the WTO panels and the AB select "ordinary" meanings "in a highly result-oriented way." For example, "the 'ordinary meaning' of the word 'comparable' varies according to different dictionaries and  is elastic enough to allow for product type and/or model distinctions within a broad 'like product' category of a certain product.

As underlined by Dongsheng Zang in an excellent recent article about textualism in GATT/WTO jurisprudence (33 Syracuse J. Int'l L. & Com. 393),  the trouble with textualism is that it can be easily paralyzed by the fact that there are always more than one ordinary meaning. As a result, the seemingly "strict textual interpretation," in effect, leaves a lot of room for WTO panels and the AB.