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I feel so enlightened and have a deeper appreciation for the dictionary, especially the Oxford English Dictionary.
It’s inevitable that a book about the making of the OED is going to have its limitations in terms of excitement, and there are times when this one does flag a little. It opens with an entertaining Prologue featuring the celebratory dinner held on the completion of the First Edition in 1928, and thereafter takes us on a trot through the history of dictionaries including of course, Samuel Johnson’s idiosyncratic version. In telling the story of the OED itself, the author concentrates on the role o...
I can't recommend this enough. Fascinating, humor-full and very readable. You wouldn't think this would be funny, but it is. I mean laugh-out-loud funny. Maybe I'm a complete nerd but this is fascinating and fun and full of things you don't need to know! The people who contributed to the dictionary are truly interesting. I loved hearing about word origins and how they fit into the dictionary -- I wish Winchester would write more on this topic. I've fallen in love with his writing style which sou...
Simon Winchester has done it again. A clear concise study of the history of the Oxford English Dictionary. I have already read one of his books, The Madman and the Professor, which describes one of the aspects of the project. This book followed that one and described the entire history instead of only one area. I listened to the audio narrated by the author, but also borrowed the book from the library. It is full of pictures of all the people who were involved, as well as an index of subjects an...
Simon Winchester's wonderful book on the making of the most venerable authority on the English language is a delightful story. I have enjoyed both the hard copy and the CD read by the author.
This seems to overlap very much with “The Surgeon of Crowthorne” (UK title) and “The Professor and the Madman” (US title), which I reviewed HERE, starting:"This is the fascinating, incredible, but true story of the 70+ year project to compile “The New English Dictionary on Historical Principles” - a biography of words that became “The Oxford English Dictionary” (OED). Not that you’d know that from the title. I enjoyed the story more than the novelistic telling of it..."
I used to be a project manager. If I had missed my deadlines by as much as the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary missed theirs, let's just say I wouldn't have retired with a party, a gift and a pension. But, then again, my project was never the first truly comprehensive compilation of every historical and current word in the English language.This book tells the story of the development of the OED, and if you think I'm exaggerating when I say the project ran late, let me tell you: It was c...
2 1/2 stars, really. There’s a reason I’ve taken at least a week to get to this summary. It’s been hard to bring myself to find something to say about it beyond a resounding ‘meh.’ It’s sad that this book hasn’t much to recommend itself as a standalone history of the Oxford English Dictionary or as a complement to Winchester’s earlier The Professor and the Madman, parts of which this book reuses and the whole of which it takes a short seven pages to recap. But then, this is a short book. I got t...
After I told my husband that I finished this book, he asked how it was. I said "It was kind of boring." And he looked at me and said, "Annette, it was a history of the dictionary. What did you expect." So um. Yeah.Moral of the story: You can stab women and still have a big vocabulary.
OED - The Oxford English Dictionary. The phrase conjures in me a picture of a massive book on a wooden library stand opened randomly to somewhere in the middle, with seemingly infinite lines of tiny text - the ultimate source of information about the meanings and derivations of words in English. In my lifetime, I've been able to take the existence of dictionaries for granted. Need a definition? Reach over to the shelf, answers available at my fingertips (and, of course, now even more literally t...
A few years ago I read the The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, and through the first few chapters of this book I was like, "Is this by the same guy? I'm sure that was by Simon Winchester too. Did he write two books on the same subject?" (it was, he did). This book is the whole story - the big picture of the creation of the OED, a project that was much bigger than the professor or the madman, and outlived them both. It is a gra...
The only flaw I could spot in this delightful book was the author's bigotry against orthodox Christianity. For instance, James Murray, the most central figure of the creation of the OED, wore a black beret in the style of one of his personal heroes, John Knox, and Winchester couldn't let pass a mention of the great Scottish reformer without getting in a dig at Monstrous Regiment that proclaimed his ignorance of the book, its author, and women. But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln enjoyed the play v...
I'm disturbed by the current trend of history authors focusing more on the biographies of the inviduals involved in a project rather than the ideas behind it. Have we as readers convinced them we are that voyeuristic? Is the People magazine approach to intellectual history the only thing that sells these days? Or do hardcore fans simply become so enamored of the figures who made it all possible that they cannot resist the urge to delve into the personal? This would be understandable if an author...