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    The Story of Ain't: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published
    The Story of Ain't: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published
    The Story of Ain't: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published
    Ebook421 pages7 hours

    The Story of Ain't: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published

    By David Skinner

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    “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 Times bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman

    The captivating, delightful, and surprising story of Merriam Webster’s Third Edition, the dictionary that provoked America’s greatest language controversy. In those days, Webster’s 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, Webster’s Third came along and ignited an unprecedented controversy in America’s newspapers, universities, and living rooms. The new dictionary’s editor, Philip Gove, had overhauled Merriam’s long held authoritarian principles to create a reference work that had “no traffic with…artificial 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 Webster’s Third’s chief nemesis when in the pages of the New Yorker he likened the new dictionary to the end of civilization..

    The Story of Ain’t 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 controversy’s key players. A dictionary will never again seem as important as it did in 1961.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJan 28, 2014
    ISBN9780062345752
    The Story of Ain't: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published
    Author

    David Skinner

    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.

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    Reviews for The Story of Ain't

    3.5/5

    3 ratings5 reviews

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    • 3/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      While the book is interesting, it was absolutely not what I was expecting. This is in fact a series of biographical vignettes of the people involved in the controversy of Webster's Third, alongside various segments about language and the process of making the dictionary. It does get very complex at times as it constantly switches between different people. It's complicated enough, in fat, that a "dramatis personae" section summarizing them was added at the end to help the hapless reader!
    • 4/5
      A rollicking romp through the fantastic (and mostly ridiculous) controversy surrounding the publication of Webster's Third International Dictionary in 1961. Skinner concentrates at first on the changes in lexicographical and linguistic thinking during the middle decades of the twentieth century, highlights the main characters in the drama (Webster's editor Philip Gove, critic Dwight Macdonald, and would-be acquirer of Merriam Webster, publisher James Parton), and outlines some of the kerfuffle which broke out over the dictionary when it was released. Skinner makes the case that much of this stemmed from an unfortunately-worded press release which snowballed and led to much condemnation of the dictionary by people who never even bothered to read it.If you like accounts of lexicographical rumbles, this is very likely a book for you. I found it utterly fascinating.
    • 4/5
      The stuff of this book is great. The words, the philosophies, the changes in language through the wars and into the Cold War era... All of it is fascinating, funny, weird, and perfectly "American." The fact that a single edition of a dictionary created so much chaos and headache, so many enemies, and such strong reactions for, not just days, but years! I wish people paid so much attention to books now.

      The organization of this book, however, is what got many people give it fewer stars that it could possibly earn. Skinner does not organize his thoughts or presentation of the important characters in the unfolding drama well and the first 200 pages are kind of a bumbling ride. Only after finishing the book did I see that there was a list of all the people involved at the back of the book.

      This is not to say that the first 200 pages are not worth reading. Some historical events are much better understood in context, and such a bizarre event as a dictionary controversy really needs some deep background. I know if Skinner had *not* told me all that he did in the beginning, I would certainly be lost as to why it was such a big deal and who all these people were and where they were coming from.

      So if you like "language wars" (well, I recommend Henry Hitchings's books, of course, but anyway), then read the first 200 or so pages using the list at the back of the book, and once the drama starts unfolding (especially after Gove is promoted), sit back and enjoy the circus. Hilarious!

      Recommended for those who love words, history, and American English.
    • 4/5
      A fascinating cultural history and an insightful look at the politics of lexicography.

    Book preview

    The Story of Ain't - David Skinner

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