The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
5+ stars.
Brilliantly constructed.
Written by a true philologist. I do not think this subject could have, or should have been written by anyone else.
An apt quote from the book: “Few are the books that can offer so much please to look at, to touch, to skim, to read” (p. 89). This is one of those books.
Perhaps one of the reasons I’m such a fan of Victorian writing, “…any grand new dictionary ought to be itself a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without any hard and fast rules of lexical conduct.” It continues:
“Any such dictionary certainly should not be an absolutist, autocratic project, such as the French had in mind. The English, who had raised eccentricity and poor organization to a high art, and placed the scatterbrain on a pedestal, loathed such middle European things as rules, conventions, and dictatorships. They abhorred the idea of diktats – about the language, for Heaven’s sake! – emanating from some secretive body of unaccountable immortals.”
The Victorian era is my favorite in all ways. After reading this book I feel more literate and educated.
The reading suggestions at the end are also particularly noteworthy.
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