An interesting background history of Webster’s third, the controversial dictionary that helped ignite the debate on whether dictionaries should be descriptive or prescriptive. ( )

Besides the two quibbles I already stated, I had some problems with this. It seems as though Skinner's starting point on the whole issue might have been David Foster Wallace's essay on the dictionary in [b:Consider the Lobster and Other Essays|6751|Consider the Lobster and Other Essays|David Foster Wallace|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1344266666s/6751.jpg|2207382]. I say seems because Wallace is mentioned in the into (I think) and in the last chapter, and the essay isn't really discussed at length.

You know what is covered at length? The political, professional, and romantic history of Macdonald, a guy who wrote an essay bashing Webster's Third when it came out. By contrast, the actual business of crafting the new dictionary is given fairly short shrift. It is meticulous, and tedious. The editorial room was kept quiet. The most enlivening detail was that smoking was permitted in the restroom, which was therefor a common hang-out.

Yes, I'm nerdy, but I'm really interested in the dictionary stuff. At least as much as someone who's never been taught English grammar could be, because I never really did understand the "shall" versus "will" issue. And since "ain't" is in the title, I would have expected the history of it to be a little more detailed. [turns out "ain't" had appeared in dictionaries before the third, so no big news there]

There was good stuff, too, besides smoking in the boy's room, but I can't recall it. It was buried under a cast of a gazillion middle-aged white guys, and irrelevant (to my interests) details about a failed bid to take over Merriam-Webster. Overall digressive info usually appeals, but this felt like misdirection: here's trivia about [a:Mary MacCarthy|502603|Mary MacCarthy|http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-F-50x66-2a9d702c2a0f483c9f7dd119cc28a9a7.jpg]'s romantic life, pay no attention to the dictionary behind the curtain.

To be fair, maybe it's not Skinner, maybe it's me. I'm an OED fan, after all. If you are, too, read [b:The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary|25019|The Professor and the Madman A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary|Simon Winchester|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1349070925s/25019.jpg|1628566].

Library copy. ( )

Few decades have caused more controversy than the 1960s, a time of explosive change in which tradition and authority gave way to freedom - a sweeping transformation crystalized in the 1961 publication of "Webster's Third New International Dictionary".

A fascinating cultural history and an insightful look at the politics of lexicography. ( )

Ultimately, I'm glad I read this book, but about a quarter of the way into it I was shouting expletives at the book and barely restraining myself from throwing it across the room. Part of the problem for me was that the chapters are so short (40 chapters in about 300 pages) and flit from one subject to another with little transition, so it was hard to get a handle on what the point of the book was. And Skinner's snide, oh-so-clever journalistic authorial voice didn't help either, as he mercilessly skewered anyone he could with any random fact about or quote from them he could shoehorn in, claiming that it told us all we needed to know about *that* person. Ultimately, though, I felt the stories coming together, as we started to see the linguists and literary intellectuals on a collision course that put Webster's Third square at the center of a bizarre culture war. So, I ended up getting something out of the book, and the chapter that perplexed or annoyed me were compensated for by the ones that were genuinely informative, or at least amusing.

A quote -- in Latin -- from Horace really shouldn't be accidentally attributed to Homer in a book that's gone through even one round of editing, though. ( )