weblog

Happy summer solstice, everyone!  To celebrate this official first day of summer, we’re offering some reading recommendations, some new, some classic, all jam-packed with word goodness.

If you’ve ever wondered how the Oxford English Dictionary came to be, read Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman, which focuses on one prolific contributor (the “madman” of the title), or for a whole history of the OED, Winchester’s The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary.

If you’re interested in lexicographical founding fathers, you might like the classic The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell, as well as the recently released The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture, by Joshua Kendall.

More keen on deciphering dictionaries? Then try How to Read a Word, in which historical lexicographer Elizabeth Knowles “offers clear guidance on how to explore the various aspects of words,” including “pronunciation, spelling, date of first use, etymology, regional distribution, and meaning, all spiced with intriguing examples.”  To hone your writing skills, check out How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, by Stanley Fish.  If presentation skills are your concern, then Jerry Weisman’s Presentations in Action: 80 Memorable Presentation Lessons from the Masters might help.

If you don’t like language “sticklers,” you might like You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity, by Economist correspondent Robert Lane Greene. Greene asserts that “language is about communication rather than just rules and that debates about language and its rules are often really about politics.”

Slang your thang?  Check out The First Dictionary of Slang, 1699, first published in the 17th century and reissued this past October.  The dictionary was “the first work dedicated to slang words and their meanings,” and was “aimed to educate the more polite classes in the language and, consequently, the methods of thieves and vagabonds, protecting the innocent from cant speakers and their activities.” (If you really want to go all-out, try the three-volume Green’s Dictionary of Slang, by Jonathon Green.)

In the realm of language history, Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way examines the origins of English, English dialects, spelling reform, prescriptive grammar, and swearing.  In The Language Wars: A History of Proper English, available October 2011, Henry Hitchings “examines the present state of the conflict [of the English language], its history, and its future,” where the ideas of “proper usage” came from, and “grammar rules, regional accents, swearing, spelling, dictionaries, political correctness, and the role of electronic media in reshaping language.”

If you can’t wait till October, take a look at Hitchings’ 2008 book, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English, which plays up the “acquisitiveness of English” and its propensity for collecting words from “more than 350 other languages.” The book “has a wide sweep, from pre-Roman Britain to online communities.”

Available this August is John McWhorter’s What Language Is: And What It Isn’t and What It Could Be. The linguist examines languages of all types, from “vanishing languages spoken by a few hundred people to major tongues like Chinese,” and “how languages across the globe. . .originate, evolve, multiply, and divide.”  Meanwhile, in On The Death and Life of Languages, Claude Hagège focuses on vanishing or dying languages, how they die, and how they can be revitalized.

In her recent Boston Globe column, Erin McKean talked about “nevers” and Mardy Grothe’s collection of quotations, Neverisms: A Quotation Lover’s Guide to Things You Should Never Do, Never Say, or Never Forget (as in, “Never let ‘em see you sweat,” “Never let a crisis go to waste,” “Never ruin an apology with an excuse”).

Finally, if novels are more up your alley, you might like The Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan, which tells the story of a broken heart through dictionary definitions (“I, n. Me without anyone else”); as well as Milorad Pavic’s The Dictionary of the Khazars. Originally written in Serbo-Croatian, the novel “purports to be the historical record of the Khazars, a fictional Indo-European tribe that vanished in the 10th century.”  The entries are alphabetical but “can be perused at random, read start to finish or back to front.”  As well, two different versions are available, “designated ‘male’ and ‘female,’ and differing by only 15 lines.”

For a list of these books, see below.  Happy summer reading!

Biographies

• The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture, by Joshua Kendall
• The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell

Dictionaries

• The First Dictionary of Slang, 1699
• Green’s Dictionary of Slang, by Jonathon Green

History

• The Language Wars: A History of Proper English, by Henry Hitchings (available October 2011)
• The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester
• The Mother Tongue, by Bill Bryson
• On the Death and Life of Languages, Claude Hagège
• The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester
• The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English, by Henry Hitchings
• What Language Is: And What It Isn’t and What It Could Be, by John McWhorter (available August 2011)
• You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity, by Robert Lane Greene

How To

• How to Read a Word, by Elizabeth Knowles
• How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, by Stanley Fish
• Presentations in Action: 80 Memorable Presentation Lessons from the Masters, Jerry Weisman

Quotations

• Neverisms: A Quotation Lover’s Guide to Things You Should Never Do, Never Say, or Never Forget, by Mardy Grothe

Fiction

• The Lover’s Dictionary, by David Levithan
• The Dictionary of the Khazars, by Milorad Pavic

Perhaps you’d like to sound more intelligent, or you have a job interview coming up.  Maybe you’re wondering what words should be part of your lexicon, or you’re just looking for some fun words to say.  If so, these Pocket Posh® Word Power dictionaries are for you!

Wordnik has partnered with Andrews McMeel Publishing to produce these four pocket-sized dictionaries, available May 31:

120 Words to Make You Sound Intelligent
120 Job Interview Words You Should Know
120 Words You Should Know
120 Words That Are Fun to Say

Small in size but big on information, each dictionary includes pronunciations, parts of speech, definitions, usage in a sentence, and etymology information. 120 Words to Make You Sound Intelligent also has an index of Prefixes and Suffixes.

With 120 Words to Make You Sound Intelligent, you’ll adorn your conversations with precise and elegant words such as muliebrity, insouciant, extirpate, and vitiate.

Business jargon can get your foot in the door . . . or get the door slammed in your face. Learn the right ways and contexts in which to use words such as stakeholder, kanban, and throughput to get noticed for the “right” reasons inside 120 Words to Use in a Job Interview.

From absquatulate to zoilist to words found in between (such as hullabaloo, phantasmagorical, and obstreperous), 120 Words That Are Fun to Say offers a list of smile-inducing words that will raise your spirits along with your word power.

Words such as propinquity, armillary, and farrago should be vocabulary staples. Consult 120 Words You Should Know to determine other additions to your lexicon.

Whether for Father’s Day, a recent grad, or that word nerd in your life (or yourself!), the Pocket Posh® Word Power collection is a gift that promises to boost vocabulary prowess.  Pre-order your copies today!

Check out our Words of the Day over the next couple of weeks for more samples from all four dictionaries.

I used to work at the Woods Hole Institute of Oceanography, in a basement office within sight of where Alvin was built. The basement held another, less-heralded marvel: the free table. Whenever a lab was overhauled or a grad student moved on, they’d cull their detritus and dump it on the free table. Part of the pinko ethos that infects academia, no doubt, but a wonderful thing.

Usual fare ran toward outdated WordPerfect manuals, but you would sometimes find a collection of neatly piled Pyrex labware with a note saying “slightly contaminated.” Or a broken oscilloscope. Or five cartons of Hollerith cards. Pretty great to a technostalgic pack rat.

I especially loved finding specialized reference books. They’re usually de facto dictionaries, but the words are in situ, being put to good use as they’re being defined. One of my favorite free table gimmes was just such a book: The Audio Cyclopedia*, by Howard M. Tremaine. Probably bought in the seventies by someone working on sonar or recording whale songs, it’s a 1,700 page compendium of recording technology, in excruciating detail and with a weird Jeopardy! pose-everything-as-a-question prose style.

It is an absolutely tremendous source of of technicalese and audio industry terms of art, so yesterday I finally started a list I’ve been meaning to get to for a long time: Audio Argot, inspired by the Audio Cyclopedia. Please contribute, it’s an open list. Anything audio related fits the bill, I think—words needn’t come specifically from the Cyclopedia, but for those that do I’ll add a citation. Here’s the list.

* It seems to still be in demand. My scavenged copy is the 2nd edition, first published in 1969; the first edition was published in 1959 and it is not cheap.

A little Friday fantasia: in September of 2007 Curious Expeditions collected dozens of pictures of stunning old libraries in a post titled Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries, which was just sent to me by my old pal Magnolia. They’re incredible.

I’ve spent my entire life surrounded either by clean-lined modernism or an almost equally spare New England aesthetic, and it’s startling to be reminded that baroque and rococo (barococo?) confections like this were ever built, let alone on this scale and in such profusion. Likewise, information is now so ubiquitous, and incorporeal, and cheap, it’s jolting to think of a time when it was rare, and heavy, and expensive, and so justified the building of palaces like this to contain it.

Curious Expeditions says they’ll leave it to someone else to post a list of beautiful modern libraries, like Louis Kahn’s library at Exeter. If anyone knows of one, please let us know in the comments.

My idle threat to turn Errata into a blog about bookshelves has been shelved, since it was pointed out that there’s already quite a good blog about bookshelves.

Most “Bookshelf” posts are about designy bookshelves, though some cover bookish art projects, like Richard Wentworth’s delightful “False Ceiling,” pictured at right.

Best niche blog since Literally, A Web Log. Thanks Robert!

This is the least practical staircase ever. Tabbed treads to throw off eye and foot. Stripped lines all over the place, and in every plane, to toy with your depth perception. Clearly an ankle breaker.

As for the books, they must get punted all the time. And a typical stair riser is not more than 7″ high, which means nothing but smallish trade paperbacks under there.

Still, it’s totally awesome, and I want one. Park a bookinist at the top, and you’re in the catbird seat.

I missed it when it ran this summer, but in June Paper Cuts, the Times book blog, posted a slideshow of old book ads from what it called the “Golden Age” of book advertising.

Included are ads for a bunch of heavy hitters like Susan Sontag, Edna O’Brien, Cormac McCarthy, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, and Donald Barthelme. I’m not sure I’d call it a Golden Age–the books may be impressive, but the ads seem to have thrived then as now on hidebound cliché*. But there’s some good stuff there, and more than a few signs of the time: overt sexism, boomer self-importance, and everybody’s smoking.

Unfortunately a number of the images are poorly reproduced. Seems a shame, for a slideshow, especially one so otherwise intersting. Maybe we should all chip in a few bucks and get Paper Cuts a new scanner.

* A cliché, I know.