Story of Ain't (eBook)

Created by the most respected American publisher of dictionaries and supervised by 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.' Critics bayed at the dictionary's permissive handling of ain't. Literary intellectuals such as Dwight Macdonald believed the abandonment of the old standard represented the unraveling of civilization.

Entertaining and erudite, 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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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 Timesbestselling author ofThe Professor and the MadmanThe captivating, delightful, and surprising story ofMerriam Websters Third Edition, the dictionary that provoked Americas greatest language controversy. In those days,Websters 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, Websters Third came along and ignited an unprecedented controversy in Americas newspapers, universities, and living rooms. The new dictionarys editor, Philip Gove, had overhauled Merriams long held authoritarian principles to create a reference work that had no traffic withartificial 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 Websters Thirds chief nemesis when in the pages of the New Yorker he likened the new dictionary to the end of civilization..The Story of Aint 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 controversys key players. A dictionary will never again seem as important as it did in 1961.