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Rating: 
Summary: an enormous amount of interesting, useful information
Review: . . .the first fourteen chapters. . .gather in one place an enormous amount of interesting, useful information about (deceased) lexicographers and the dictionaries they prepared.as reviewed by Laurence Urdang in the Winter 1997 issue (Vol. XXIII, No. 3) of VERBATIM, The Language Quarterly.
Rating:
Summary: A few will love this book; most won't
Review: It's probably just me, but I had a hard time staying awake while reading this book, although I must admit my ears "pricked" up during the sections on slang. Green is an expert in this area, and his enthusiastic style belies the fact. The rest of the book was a bit less engaging. Hey, go ahead and get it anyway - it's only like ten bucks!
Rating:
Summary: A few will love this book; most won't
Review: It's probably just me, but I had a hard time staying awake while reading this book, although I must admit my ears "pricked" up during the sections on slang. Green is an expert in this area, and his enthusiastic style belies the fact. The rest of the book was a bit less engaging. Hey, go ahead and get it anyway - it's only like ten bucks!
Rating: 
Summary: Lexicographers as priests -- and people
Review: On the surface, dictionary-making seems like an unlikely subject for a history intended for anyone other than specialists to read. Yet Jonathon Green succeeds in leading the reader to appreciate, first, that dictionary-makers serve an important role as arbiters of the language we use to shape our lives, and second, that they are not "harmless drudges" (in Samuel Johnson's memorable phrase), but people with colorful, even strange, backgrounds. Green has several objects in his history. One of the primary ones is to elevate the lexicographer from drudge to priest. He points particularly to America in the nineteenth century as a land where immigrants and lower-class people wanted to be told how to speak and write properly in order to advance in society. They looked to dictionaries and their makers as the arbiters of what counted as "correct" language. Green argues that America has generally tended toward prescriptive dictionaries, while England has been home to more descriptive efforts. He clearly sides with the latter, and his discussion of the controversy over Webster's Third International (which took a more descriptive approach than most American dictionaries) with barely disguised disbelief -- how could people have been so silly? Still, his editorializing is relatively subtle -- and convincing. Another of Green's goals is to present the people behind the dictionaries. In the modern world, dictionaries are identified by their publishers -- the American Heritage, the OED, the Merriam-Webster -- and the people involved vanish into anonymity. This was not always the case, as Green makes clear. Dictionaries from the sixteenth century onward were known by their authors, despite the fact that the dictionaries drew on (and, frankly, plagiarized) each other. The authors did not shy from letting their personalities and biases show through. What is more, they and their modern successors led unusual lives, shaped by the near-fanaticism that lexicography seems to require. Green shows us these characters, from the cash-strapped but elitist Samuel Johnson, to James Murray, long in charge of the OED, with his vast arrays of cubbyholes and contributors (including an inmate of the Broadmoor insane asylum!). Green's history is very readable, if sometimes more detailed than necessary; he tends to throw more names at the reader than anyone could possibly keep straight. Still, the book should be fascinating for anyone with a love of words and a curiosity about unusual people.
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