Two fascinating histories of English and of its words

[Joe Carillo]

The Lexicographer’s Dilemma by Jack Lynch

Jack Lynch, who teaches English at Rutgers University and had edited Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, has come up with a book that traces the evolution of respectable English from the time of Shakespeare up to the present day. He explains that he wrote the book, The Lexicographer’s Dilemma, primarily in response to questions sent to his online “Guide to Grammar and Style” that usually took this form: “When I was in school, Sister Mary Martha taught me such-and-such. Now I see everyone writes so-and-so. Have the rules changed?”
 

Lynch says that although he found such questions reasonable, they were almost impossible to answer. “The problem is that ‘the rules’ (as most people understand them) aren’t spelled out anywhere,” he explains, “so there’s no simple way to tell whether they’ve changed—and there’s certainly no simple way to change them by a majority vote.”

The result of his efforts to answer those questions sensibly is The Lexicographer’s Dilemma, which Carolyn See describes in her review in The Washington Post as a “delightful look at efforts through the centuries to define and control the English language (that) turns out to be a history of human exasperation, frustration and free-floating angst.”

She explains in her review: “Jack Lynch…gives us not a history of the English language but a history of those who have tried to make sense of it. He divides them into ‘prescriptive’ and ‘descriptive’ linguists: The former try with all their might to purge the language of undesirable words and constructions; the latter, acting on the theory that the language is untamable, simply try to describe its current use.”

Read Jack Lynch’s “Meditations on the English language” in Psychology Today now!

Read Carolyn See’s review of The Lexicographer’s Dilemma in The Washington Post now!

The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words by Simon Winchester

British author and journalist Simon Winchester has come up a book about Dr. William Chester Minor, a former US army surgeon charged with murder and madness in 19th century Britain who later spent nearly four decades in an asylum from where he became one of the most prolific volunteer contributors to the monumental Oxford English Dictionary. Rahul Sharma, editor of the Khaleej Times in the United Arab Emirates, says in his review of Winchester’s The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Word that the book is actually “more about words than murder and madness.” He says it is a fascinating, unputdownable story “about a man who probably contributed more to that grand dame of English language—the Oxford English Dictionary—than many who toiled to put it together over a period of several decades.”  

Read Rahul Sharma’s review of The Surgeon of Crowthorne in Khaleej Times now!