Hardcore Dictionaries
Ammon Shea wonders what makes a dictionary “hardcore”.
A Celebration of Making Old “Make” New
Ammon Shea looks at the word “make.”
BEA Dispatch
Purdy, Director of Publicity, is in LA this weekend at Book Expo America. He will be reporting from the action for those of us left in NYC. Live from the convention floor of BEA in LA. For those not in the know BEA stands for Book Expo America, the largest convention of publishers, media, bookstore […]
Waiting for Petrichor
Ammon Shea, an expert dictionary reader, reflects on rain.
Words Out of Context
Ammon Shea explains an alternative use for dictionaries.
Bloomberg and “Maintain”
Ammon, an expert dictionary reader, ponders Mayor Bloomberg’s dislike of the word “maintain”.
Samuel Johnson and the First English Dictionary
Ammon Shea wonders who wrote the first English dictionary.
Linguistic Pet Peeves:
Or, I’d Rather Be Napping
Ammon Shea shares a pet peeve.
How Dictionaries Ruined My Scrabble Game
Ammon Shea explains how dictionaries ruined his Scrabble game.
What Every beginning Dictionary Reader Should Know
Ammon Shea shares some advice for beginning dictionary readers.
Your cheatin’ words
Ammon Shea explores cheating in the OED.
Walter W. Skeat and the Oxford English Dictionary
For many years, I have been trying to talk an old friend of mine into writing a popular book on Skeat. A book about such a colorful individual, I kept repeating, would sell like hotcakes. But he never wrote it. Neither will I (much to my regret), but there is no reason why I should not devote another short essay to Skeat. In 2016, Oxford University Press published Peter Gilliver’s book The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, a work of incredible erudition.
Jonah and genre [long read]
Reading a piece of writing—from instruction manual, to sports page, to Op-Ed piece—according to its genre is something we do so naturally that it seems odd to even talk about it. Indeed, the very phrase “reading according to genre” sounds odd itself, entirely too formal, perhaps suitable for some English or Comparative Literature class, but hardly something that normal people do when reading normal things on an everyday basis.
Conversations with Dostoevsky
The first time I visited St Petersburg, nearly thirty years ago, I stayed not far from the area in which Dostoevsky set the action of Crime and Punishment. The tenement blocks were, for the most part, those that Dostoevsky himself would have seen—indeed, one friend lived at Grazhdanskaya 19, a possible location for the coffin-like garret inhabited by Raskolnikov, the novel’s homicidal anti-hero.
Etymologicon and other books on etymology
In the previous post, I answered the first question from our correspondents (idioms with the names of body parts in them) and promised to answer the other one I had received during the break. The second question concerned the book titled The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections.
Back to work: body and etymology
While the blog was dormant, two questions came my way, and I decided to answer them at once, rather than putting them on a back burner. Today, I’ll deal with the first question and leave the second for next week. Since the publication of my recent book Take My Word for It (it deals with […]