Hardly harmless drudgery : a 500-year pictorial history of the lexicographic geniuses, sciolists, plagiarists, & obsessives who defined the English language / Bryan A. Garner and Jack Lynch.
"This book accompanies the book exhibition 'Hardly Harmless Drudgery,' originally mounted at the Grolier Club in New York City (Spring/Summer 2024)."--Title page verso. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents:
Primordial beginnings -- A kind of dawning -- The conventional start -- The early 18th century -- The age of authority -- Linguistic independence & its sequelae -- Lexical warfare -- The OED era -- What's a guardian to do? -- Offbeat English -- The digital age.
Summary:
"An illustrated history of the dictionary and the many obsessed compilers, charlatans, and geniuses, who made them. Dictionaries are repositories of erudition, monuments to linguistic authority, and battlefields in cultural and political struggles. They are works of almost superhuman endurance, produced by people who devote themselves for years or even decades to wearisome labor. Dictionaries can become commodities in a fiercely competitive publishing business, and they can keep a business afloat for generations or sink it swiftly. They are also often beautiful objects: typographically innovative, designed to project learning and authority. The painstaking work of corralling, recording, and defining the vocabulary of a language has inspired best-selling books, both fiction and nonfiction, and even two major motion pictures. This is the dictionary's story. The book tells the stories behind great works of scholarship but, more important, it tells the stories of the people behind them-their prodigious endurance, their nationalist fervor, their philological elucubrations haphazardly mixed with crackpot theories, their petty rivalries, and their sometimes irrational conduct and visceral hatreds. Most of Hardly Harmless Drudgery will be a chronological narrative, covering more than half a millennium from the late 15th century to the early 21st. This main chronological narrative will occasionally pause for digressions on the themes and questions that arise throughout the history of lexicography. Endurance and delayed gratification, for instance, are necessary virtues for any successful lexicographer. Samuel Johnson, working with the aid of only a few copyists, did in 9 years what the 40 "immortels" of l'Acad�emie fran�caise could not do in less than 40. And the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains roughly 38 million words of text-about 50 times the length of the King James Bible. Not that publishers always welcome such large and slow-moving projects. The OED was supposed to be a 4-volume work, produced in a decade, but it turned into 13 volumes published over half a century, and it required the invention of crowdsourcing in the Victorian era. Big reference projects are costly, and teams of experts work for years before they produce any revenue. The flagship dictionaries we admire today attract prestige but almost always lose money; publishers since the 18th century have learned that the only way to turn a profit is to spin off a series of abridgments, school texts, pocket editions, and so on. Those who master that game can survive for decades, but ruinous business deals have destroyed many fortunes-including that of Noah Webster. Today anyone can publish under the name "Webster's dictionary." Dictionaries also induce us to ask about the basis of authority. Who gets to say what is an English word and what is not, what words mean, and how words should be used? Johnson grounded his authority on the great writers in English, and the 114,000 quotations in his book make his Dictionary one of the largest anthologies of English literature ever compiled. Webster brought his own conception of great literature, imbued with a strong sense of American patriotism. The OED broadened the scope to cover what Murray called "Anglicity," a global map of the language. The nature of linguistic authority became most controversial during the dustup over Webster's Third in the early 1960s. For readers of books such as The Professor and the Madman, for bibliophiles and anyone who loves words, this story of dictionaries is enormously entertaining"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.