Posted inA-Town Magazine, Books

Book Review: Webster’s Third and the world war over which words

David Skinner’s “The Story of Ain’t: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published” (Harper) is an immensely entertaining history of a dictionary whose appearance in 1961 sent critics over the edge. “Literary anarchy,” ”sabotage,” ”disaster,” ”calamity” — these were just a few of the epithets hurled at Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. More […]

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