The opening paragraph of fellow Cannonballer Halb’s review of The Madman and the Professor sealed the deal that this would be the choice for my “Cannonballer Says” Bingo square, “Fans of Comedy Central’s tv show “Drunk History” may be familiar with the story of Dr. William Minor: The Civil War doctor showed signs of struggling with mental health during and after the war (how could one not), and moved to London for a fresh start. Unfortunately, Dr. Minor suffered from the beliefs that all kinds of people […]
The Oxford English Dictionary Was Basically Wikipedia
Fans of Comedy Central’s tv show “Drunk History” may be familiar with the story of Dr. William Minor: The Civil War doctor showed signs of struggling with mental health during and after the war (how could one not), and moved to London for a fresh start. Unfortunately, Dr. Minor suffered from the beliefs that all kinds of people were out to get him, and those beliefs led him to shoot an innocent stranger in cold blood. The American was institutionalized. Concurrently, Professor James Murray was […]
“An end to timidity – the replacement of the philologically tentative by the lexicographically decisive.”
You’d think in a non-fiction book about a professor, a madman and the dictionary, that the driest parts would be about the dictionary. Instead, those parts fascinated me while the biographical information about its two main creators bored me to tears. “In the sixteenth century in England, dictionaries such as we would recognize today simply did not exist. If the language that so inspired Shakespeare had limits, if its words had definable origins, spellings, pronunciations, meanings—then no single book existed that established them, defined them, and […]