The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the OED
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With marvelous brio, Simon Winchester has created a truly wonderful celebration of the English language and of its unrivaled treasure house, the Oxford English Dictionary. He serves up a lightning history of the English language...
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With marvelous brio, Simon Winchester has created a truly wonderful celebration of the English language and of its unrivaled treasure house, the Oxford English Dictionary. He serves up a lightning history of the English language -- "so vast, so sprawling, so wonderfully unwieldy" -- and pays homage to the great dictionary makers, from "the irredeemably famous" Samuel Johnson to the "short, pale, smug and boastful" schoolmaster from New Hartford, Noah Webster. He then turns to the making of this most venerable of dictionaries, in which the reader will discover lively portraits of such key figures as the brilliant but tubercular first editor Herbert Coleridge (grandson of the poet), the colorful, boisterous Frederick Furnivall (who left the project in a shambles), and James Augustus Henry Murray, who spent half a century bringing the project to fruition. Winchester lovingly describes the nuts-and-bolts of dictionary making -- how unexpectedly tricky the dictionary entry for marzipan was, how fraternity turned out so much longer and monkey so much more ancient that anticipated -- and how bondmaid was left out completely, its slips found lurking under a pile of books long after the B-volume had gone to press. In the ugly corrugated iron structure that Murray grandly dubbed the Scriptorium -- the Scrippy or the Shed, as locals called it -- we meet some of the legion of volunteers, from Fitzedward Hall, a bitter hermit obsessively devoted to the OED, to W. C. Minor, whose story is one of dangerous madness, ineluctable sadness, and ultimate redemption. The Meaning of Everything is a scintillating account of the creation of the greatest monument ever erected to a living language. Simon Winchester's supple, vigorous prose illuminates this dauntingly ambitious project, a 75-year odyssey to create the world's unrivalled uber-dictionary. Hardcover, 256 pages. back to Reference Books | back to Books | Library Shop Home
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The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the OED 0198607024$25.00
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From the list : Bibliophile Related by khahn718
Book about the history of the Oxford English Dictionary. (I know. It sounds boring, but it's not!)
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