Created by the most respected American publisher of dictionaries and supervised by the editor Philip Gove, Websters Third broke with tradition, adding thousands of new words and eliminating artificial notions of correctness, basing proper usage on how language was actually spoken. The dictionarys revolutionary style sparked what David Foster Wallace called the Fort Sumter of the Usage Wars. Editors and scholars howled for Goves blood, calling him an enemy of clear thinking, a great relativist who was trying to sweep the English language into chaos. Critics bayed at the dictionarys permissive handling of aint. Literary intellectuals such as Dwight Macdonald believed the dictionarys scientific approach to language and its abandonment of the old standard of usage represented the unraveling of civilization.Entertaining and erudite, The Story of Aint describes a great societal metamorphosis, tracing the fallout of the world wars, the rise of an educated middle class, and the emergence of America as the undisputed leader of the free world, and illuminating how those forces shaped our language. Never before or since has a dictionary so embodied the cultural transformation of the United States.
Autorentext
Zusammenfassung
It takes true brilliance to lift the arid tellings of lexicographic fussing into the readable realm of the thriller and the bodice-ripper.David Skinner has done precisely this, taking a fine story and honing it to popular perfection.Simon Winchester,New York Timesbestselling author ofThe Professor and the MadmanThe captivating, delightful, and surprising story ofMerriam Websters Third Edition, the dictionary that provoked Americas greatest language controversy. In those days,Websters Second was the great gray eminence of American dictionaries, with 600,000 entries and numerous competitors but no rivals. It served as the all-knowing guide to the world of grammar and information, a kind of one-stop reference work.In 1961, Websters Third came along and ignited an unprecedented controversy in Americas newspapers, universities, and living rooms. The new dictionarys editor, Philip Gove, had overhauled Merriams long held authoritarian principles to create a reference work that had no traffic withartificial notions of correctness or authority. It must be descriptive not prescriptive. Correct use was determined by how the language was actually spoken, and not by notions of correctness set by the learned few. Dwight MacDonald, a formidable American critic and writer, emerged as Websters Thirds chief nemesis when in the pages of the New Yorker he likened the new dictionary to the end of civilization..The Story of Aint describes a great cultural shift in America, when the voice of the masses resounded in the highest halls of culture, when the division between highbrow and lowbrow was inalterably blurred, when the humanities and its figureheads were shunted aside by advances in scientific thinking. All the while, Skinner treats the reader to the chippy banter of the controversys key players. A dictionary will never again seem as important as it did in 1961.
Autorentext
David Skinner is a writer and editor living in Alexandria, Virginia. He writes about language, culture, and his life as a husband, father, and suburbanite. He has been a staff editor at the Weekly Standard, for which he still writes, and an editor of Doublethink magazine. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New Atlantis, Slate, the Washington Times, the American Spectator, and many other publications. Skinner is the editor of Humanities magazine, which is published by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is on the usage panel for the American Heritage Dictionary.
Zusammenfassung
It takes true brilliance to lift the arid tellings of lexicographic fussing into the readable realm of the thriller and the bodice-ripper.David Skinner has done precisely this, taking a fine story and honing it to popular perfection.Simon Winchester,New York Timesbestselling author ofThe Professor and the MadmanThe captivating, delightful, and surprising story ofMerriam Websters Third Edition, the dictionary that provoked Americas greatest language controversy. In those days,Websters Second was the great gray eminence of American dictionaries, with 600,000 entries and numerous competitors but no rivals. It served as the all-knowing guide to the world of grammar and information, a kind of one-stop reference work.In 1961, Websters Third came along and ignited an unprecedented controversy in Americas newspapers, universities, and living rooms. The new dictionarys editor, Philip Gove, had overhauled Merriams long held authoritarian principles to create a reference work that had no traffic withartificial notions of correctness or authority. It must be descriptive not prescriptive. Correct use was determined by how the language was actually spoken, and not by notions of correctness set by the learned few. Dwight MacDonald, a formidable American critic and writer, emerged as Websters Thirds chief nemesis when in the pages of the New Yorker he likened the new dictionary to the end of civilization..The Story of Aint describes a great cultural shift in America, when the voice of the masses resounded in the highest halls of culture, when the division between highbrow and lowbrow was inalterably blurred, when the humanities and its figureheads were shunted aside by advances in scientific thinking. All the while, Skinner treats the reader to the chippy banter of the controversys key players. A dictionary will never again seem as important as it did in 1961.
Titel
The Story of Ain't
Untertitel
America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published
Autor
EAN
9780062345752
Format
E-Book (epub)
Hersteller
Herausgeber
Genre
Veröffentlichung
28.01.2014
Digitaler Kopierschutz
Adobe-DRM
Anzahl Seiten
368
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