Brilliant! Thank you!
> In tsearch2, I would like to use the "simple" dictionary along with my
> own list of stopwords.
> [...]
sure, just specify dict_initoption. For example,
test=# update pg_ts_dict set dict_initoption='contrib/english.stop' where dict_name='simple';
UPDATE 1
test=# select lexize('simple', 'the');
lexize
--------
{}
(1 row)