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

Skinner, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0062027468 ISBN 13: 9780062027467

Publisher: Harper, 2012

Synopsis

The Story of Ain't Tells the story of the people who made the dictionary, those who denounced it, and the forces that shaped it. This title traces the shift in the American lexicon in the decades leading up to 1961, identifying the changes that affected our language from the Great Depression through World War II to the 1950s. Full description

About this title

Review:

"Skinner...offers a highly entertaining and intelligent re-creation of events surrounding the 1961 publication of "Webster's Third New International Dictionary" by G. & C. Merriam...a rich and absorbing exploration of the changing standards in American language and culture." --"Publishers Weekly" (starred review)

From the Back Cover:

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 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0062027468
• ISBN 13: 9780062027467
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368