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The Story of Ain't - America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published (Paperback)
Loot Price: R443
Discovery Miles 4 430
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The Story of Ain't - America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published (Paperback)
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Loot Price R443
Discovery Miles 4 430
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Created by the most respected American publisher of dictionaries
and supervised by the editor Philip Gove, Webster's Third broke
with tradition, adding thousands of new words and eliminating
artificial notions of correctness, basing proper usage on how
language was actually spoken. The dictionary's revolutionary style
sparked what David Foster Wallace called the Fort Sumter of the
Usage Wars. Editors and scholars howled for Gove's blood, calling
him an enemy of clear thinking, a great relativist who was trying
to sweep the English language into chaos. Critics bayed at the
dictionary's permissive handling of ain't. Literary intellectuals
such as Dwight Macdonald believed the dictionary's scientific
approach to language and its abandonment of the old standard of
usage represented nothing less than the unraveling of civilization.
Entertaining and erudite, and a New York Times Book Review Editor's
Choice, The Story of Ain't describes a great societal
metamorphosis, tracing the fallout of the world wars, the rise of
an educated middle class, and the emergence of America as the
undisputed leader of the free world, and illuminating how those
forces shaped our language. Never before or since has a dictionary
so embodied the cultural transformation of the United States.
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