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... In 1961 a new edition of an old and esteemed dictionary was released. The publisher courted publicity, noting the great expense ($3.5 million) and amount of work (757 editor years) that went into its making. But the book was ill-received. It was judged “subversive” and denounced in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Life, and dozens of other newspapers, magazines, and professional journals. controversy I was interested to read the lead-in from another page: Webster's Third Dictionaary The most controversial dictionary in the English language.
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Webster's Third Dictionary The most controversial dictionary in the English language. It's an old story and a sad one. The current straw-man versions of descriptive and prescriptive[/i] trace their origin to the hubbub around its publishing. It even made it into a popular novel: She was staring up at me. "He's burning up a dictionary?"
"Right. That's nothing. Once he burned up a cookbook because it said to remove the hide from a ham end before putting it in the pot with lima beans. Which he loves most, food or words, is a tossup."
[Archie, explaining Wolfe's reaction to a dictionary that allows the use of "imply" in place of "infer," in Gambit, chapter 1.]
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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I have online access to both the OED (via my local library) and W3 (via subscription). I think I use them about equally, and if I had to give one of them up it would be a hard choice.
but it's really a moot point, since I also have a hard copy of W3, which was given me upon my retirement.
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Is there/could there be this much controversy today, do you-all think? Ex.'s: A dictionary should give primacy to generic terms, he asserted, not proper names, not geographical appendixes, not biographical information, not famous sayings, nor names from the Bible and the plays of William Shakespeare. ... The circuitous entry for door, quoted in a caustic Washington Post article, became well known: “a movable piece of a firm material or a structure supported usu. along one side and swinging on pivots or hinges, sliding along a groove, rolling up and down, revolving as one of four leaves, or folding like an accordion by means of which an opening may be closed or kept open . . .” and so on.
This definition, said Gove, was for someone who had never seen a door. ...
One sympathetic lexicographer, after using the dictionary routinely for years, complained that in listing spelling variants (momento for memento, for instance) the editors came “close to denying the possibility of error in spelling.” ...
W3 infamously included an almost full set of entries for curse words...
W2 had made expansive use of a range of labels including correct and incorrect, proper and improper, erroneous, humorous, jocular, ludicrous, gallicism, and poetic... Gove reduced possible labels to five: slang, nonstandard, substandard, obsolete, and archaic. ...
The most infamous entry in Webster’s Third, by far, was for ain’t. ... the New Yorker ran a cartoon showing a receptionist at Merriam telling a visitor that “Dr. Gove ain’t in.”
So many news articles today contain spelling errors; this is one place where one could expect correct usage, IMO. But either the editing process has degenerated or I am now among the minority in caring about spelling and grammar.
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Carpal Tunnel
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So many news articles today contain spelling errors; this is one place where one could expect correct usage, IMO. But either the editing process has degenerated or I am now among the minority in caring about spelling and grammar.
IMO, it's the editing process that has pretty much disappeared. That and the technology now means that the reporter is also the person who enters the data. In the old days, reporters turned over their typewritten stories to editors who edited them before passing them on to the typesetters who re-keyed everything and finally some paste-up guy arranged everything onto the page. The more eyes, the more likely that errors were caught. From my experience very few people know anything about punctuation, usage, or grammar, and even fewer really care. And for those who care, most of them are deluded by atrocious usage rules such as Strunk & White et al. peddle.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Pooh-Bah
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"The Adventures of Hiram Holiday" chapter one.
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