[lg policy] Wars of Words: Dividing the world into prescriptivists and descriptivists

[Dave Sayers]

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/wars-words_652878.html

The fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, published by Houghton Mifflin, was released
last fall. In the typecast world of dictionary publishing, American Heritage is the “conservative”
dictionary. Developed in the 1960s in the wake of company president James Parton’s failed attempt to
wrest control of the G. and C. Merriam Co., which had recently become notorious for the publication
of the “permissive” dictionary, Webster’s Third, the first edition of the American Heritage
Dictionary was deliberately marketed as the choice of squares and fogeys.

A print advertisement for the new dictionary showed a hippie teenager and said, “He doesn’t like
your politics; why should he like your dictionary?” This tone of square-jawed resistance to the
vulgarizing pull of popular culture provoked jeers in some quarters. American Heritage was nicknamed
the “Goldwater dictionary,” and when that seemed too generous, linguists took to calling it the
“McCarthy dictionary.”

(Link. /lɪŋk/. noun One of the rings of which a chain is composed. Click. [klɪk]. verb. To rapidly
depress and release one of the buttons on a mouse or other input device)

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/wars-words_652878.html



Dave

--
Dr. Dave Sayers
Honorary Research Fellow, Arts & Humanities, Swansea University
and Visiting Lecturer (2012-2013), Dept English, Åbo Akademi University
dave.sayers at cantab.net
http://swansea.academia.edu/DaveSayers
_______________________________________________
This message came to you by way of the lgpolicy-list mailing list
lgpolicy-list at groups.sas.upenn.edu
To manage your subscription unsubscribe, or arrange digest format: https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/lgpolicy-list