An immensely entertaining history…Skinner manages to transform this somewhat arcane lexicographical dispute into a real page turner…Skinner ably and amusingly captures the hysterical tone of the bitter public quarrel while suggesting that it foreshadowed many of the arguments over values and standards that we’re still fighting about today.” — Associated Press
“An engrossing account of the continuing ruckus over Webster’s Third New International Dictionary .” — New York Times Book Review
“Mr. Skinner does a fine job detailing the controversy that greeted Webster’s Third , but he is even stronger when describing the internal politics at Merriam and the mechanics of revising a dictionary.” — Wall Street Journal
“…comprehensive and evenhanded, and written in a clear and jaunty style…What in less skilled hands might have been arid and parochial in David Skinner’s becomes a lively account of a subject of interest to anyone concerned about the English language in America.” — Weekly Standard
“…spry cultural history” — Harper's
“[Skinner] provides well-argued critiques of the orthodoxies that define language studies” — New York Times
“A highly entertaining, thoughtful new book.” — Boston Globe
“Skinner is good on the development of 20th-century linguistics and on the interplay between America’s language and its sense of itself.” — Financial Times
“Mr. Skinner weaves a true tale fascinating not just to linguists and lexicographers, but to anyone interested in the evolution of our language during a critical period in America’s History.” — New York Journal of Books
“Skinner has written an entertaining book about a controversy that still lingers and throws light on how emotional our ties to language are….a funny and informative account.” — Columbus Dispatch
“...delightful new book on lexicography…Skinner leaves no doubt as to the importance of Webster’s Third as the game-changer in dictionary standards and the impetus for an American cultural metamorphosis.” — Shelf Awareness
“The Story of Ain’t is a book about words, the national character, and the inevitability of change. And it’s so fun, you might not even realize that you’re joining the debate.” — Hillsdale Collegian
“Skinner…offers a highly entertaining and intelligent re-creation of events surrounding the 1961 publication of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary by G. & C. Merriam…a rich and absorbing exploration of the changing standards in American language and culture.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A compelling reminder of the cultural significance of words and word-making.” — Booklist (starred review)
“A fascinating, highly entertaining cultural history that will enchant an audience beyond word nerds....Skinner nimbly, concisely—and without academic dryness—traces the everyday changes that shaped what came out of Americans’ mouths and into our dictionaries.” — BookPage
“It takes true brilliance to lift the arid tellings of lexicographic fussing into the readable realm of the thriller and the bodice-ripper. With his riveting account…David Skinner has done precisely this, taking a fine story and honing it to popular perfection.” — Simon Winchester, New York Times bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Atlantic
“The flap over Webster’s Third in 1961 was a never-to-be-repeated episode in American cultural history…. David Skinner tells it brilliantly…as he brings to life the odd cast of characters who played a role in the affair.” — Geoffrey Nunberg, University of California at Berkeley, emeritus chair of the American Heritage Dictionary usage panel, language commentator, "Fresh Air," NPR
“A fascinating account of a major paradigm shift in the American language, when a group of bold lexicographers decided to tell it like it is and causing a huge cultural rumpus. This is more than just a story about a new edition of a dictionary.” — Christopher Buckley, New York Times bestselling author of They Eat Puppies, Don't They? and Thank You for Smoking
“David Skinner tells the tale of a great battle in the 1960s War Between the Real and the Ideal. It was a conflict with realists laying claim to idealism and idealists asserting realism and vice versa. Skinner makes it all clear.” — P.J. O'Rourke, New York Times bestselling author of Holidays in Heck and Don't Vote—It Just Encourages
“A cultural story as much as a linguistic one, teeming with colorful characters and big ideas, The Story of Ain’t is a must read for anybody who loves language.” — Toby Lester, author of Da Vinci's Ghost and The Fourth Part of the World
An immensely entertaining history…Skinner manages to transform this somewhat arcane lexicographical dispute into a real page turner…Skinner ably and amusingly captures the hysterical tone of the bitter public quarrel while suggesting that it foreshadowed many of the arguments over values and standards that we’re still fighting about today.
…comprehensive and evenhanded, and written in a clear and jaunty style…What in less skilled hands might have been arid and parochial in David Skinner’s becomes a lively account of a subject of interest to anyone concerned about the English language in America.
Skinner is good on the development of 20th-century linguistics and on the interplay between America’s language and its sense of itself.
David Skinner tells the tale of a great battle in the 1960s War Between the Real and the Ideal. It was a conflict with realists laying claim to idealism and idealists asserting realism and vice versa. Skinner makes it all clear.
It takes true brilliance to lift the arid tellings of lexicographic fussing into the readable realm of the thriller and the bodice-ripper. With his riveting account…David Skinner has done precisely this, taking a fine story and honing it to popular perfection.
A cultural story as much as a linguistic one, teeming with colorful characters and big ideas, The Story of Ain’t is a must read for anybody who loves language.
...delightful new book on lexicography…Skinner leaves no doubt as to the importance of Webster’s Third as the game-changer in dictionary standards and the impetus for an American cultural metamorphosis.
Skinner is good on the development of 20th-century linguistics and on the interplay between America’s language and its sense of itself.
Mr. Skinner does a fine job detailing the controversy that greeted Webster’s Third , but he is even stronger when describing the internal politics at Merriam and the mechanics of revising a dictionary.
An immensely entertaining history…Skinner manages to transform this somewhat arcane lexicographical dispute into a real page turner…Skinner ably and amusingly captures the hysterical tone of the bitter public quarrel while suggesting that it foreshadowed many of the arguments over values and standards that we’re still fighting about today.
A fascinating account of a major paradigm shift in the American language, when a group of bold lexicographers decided to tell it like it is and causing a huge cultural rumpus. This is more than just a story about a new edition of a dictionary.
"A compelling reminder of the cultural significance of words and word-making."
Humanities editor Skinner, who is on the usage panel for the American Heritage Dictionary, offers a highly entertaining and intelligent re-creation of events surrounding the 1961 publication of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary by G. & C. Merriam. The dictionary, assembled at a cost of .5 million, included a press release from Merriam’s president Gordon J. Gallan, which said the work contained “an avalanche of bewildering new verbal concepts.” The new dictionary embraced informal English in 450,000 total entries, including 100,000 new words, including clunk (from Mickey Spillane), cool (from jazz), and snafu (from WWII). Editor Philip Gove’s break with tradition, the refusal to distinguish between good language and bad, outraged academics and editorial writers, setting in motion what Skinner calls “the single greatest language controversy in American history.” A Chicago Tribune headline announced “Saying Ain’t Ain’t Wrong.” Life labeled Webster’s Third “a non-word deluge,” and it was vilified as “literary anarchy.” To probe why it triggered such volcanic eruptions, Skinner shows how Gove sought to construct a modern, linguistically rigorous dictionary and details how Dwight Macdonald and other critics sought to destroy it. The result is a rich and absorbing exploration of the changing standards in American language and culture. Agent: Rafe Sagalyn Agency. (Oct.)
Mr. Skinner does a fine job detailing the controversy that greeted Webster’s Third , but he is even stronger when describing the internal politics at Merriam and the mechanics of revising a dictionary.
…spry cultural history
A highly entertaining, thoughtful new book.
Skinner has written an entertaining book about a controversy that still lingers and throws light on how emotional our ties to language are….a funny and informative account.
An engrossing account of the continuing ruckus over Webster’s Third New International Dictionary .
New York Times Book Review
Mr. Skinner weaves a true tale fascinating not just to linguists and lexicographers, but to anyone interested in the evolution of our language during a critical period in America’s History.
New York Journal of Books
[Skinner] provides well-argued critiques of the orthodoxies that define language studies
A compelling reminder of the cultural significance of words and word-making.
Booklist (starred review)
A fascinating, highly entertaining cultural history that will enchant an audience beyond word nerds....Skinner nimbly, concisely—and without academic dryness—traces the everyday changes that shaped what came out of Americans’ mouths and into our dictionaries.
The flap over Webster’s Third in 1961 was a never-to-be-repeated episode in American cultural history…. David Skinner tells it brilliantly…as he brings to life the odd cast of characters who played a role in the affair.
The Story of Ain’t is a book about words, the national character, and the inevitability of change. And it’s so fun, you might not even realize that you’re joining the debate.
Webster's Third New International Dictionary (W3) was published in 1961. Press reaction was harsh, and the public debate on the subject was included in James Sledd and Wilma R. Ebbitt's Dictionaries and That Dictionary (1962). W3's treatment of ain't was particularly scrutinized thanks to misleading material distributed by the publisher's press agents. Criticism focused on W3's lack of "prescriptivism," i.e., that the dictionary should make judgments on what's proper and what's not. Skinner is editor of the National Endowment for the Humanities' Humanities magazine, and this book began as a 2009 article there. That article was a good, concise discussion. In book form, Herbert Morton's The Story of Webster's Third (1994) thoroughly and learnedly covered all this. Skinner's book, on the other hand, flits among topics and spends endless pages on the life story of Dwight Macdonald, the critic who wrote a long, damning account of W3 in The New Yorker—the book is as much about Macdonald as anything else. VERDICT Readers will be better served by the two books named above. This one is unorganized and quite shallow.—Michael O. Eshleman, Kings Mills, OH
Former Weekly Standard editor and current Humanities magazine editor Skinner debuts with the story of Webster's Third New International Dictionary , whose 1961 publication prompted assorted pundits to declare that the end of civilization was nigh. Imagine a time when a dictionary could animate the media as much as a political sex scandal. It wasn't that long ago. Skinner, who serves on the usage panel for the American Heritage Dictionary , knows dictionaries and how they are made and devotes a large portion of his attention to the nouns-and-verbs aspects of lexicography. (How are words discovered and selected? How are definitions written? Where do the examples come from?) The author also profiles the people who made the decisions about the book, including Dr. Philip Gove, editor-in-chief for the project, and his predecessors and successors. The author also sketches the stories of the dictionary's harshest critics, principally Dwight Macdonald, whose biography Skinner distributes throughout. He examines the powerful cultural forces involved, including the rise of structural linguistics and cultural relativism, the effects of TV and movies on vocabulary, and the country's changing demographics. We learn why the F-bomb and others are not in the book, and why Gove changed the style of definitions, why he included so many varying pronunciations, and why he viewed the volume as descriptive rather than prescriptive. This latter function is what ignited critics, many of whom believed the lexicographers had caved and had no interest in maintaining standards. (The author points out that ain't was in many dictionaries, including Webster's Second .) Skinner carefully identifies the critics' errors and the lexicographers' missteps, and he explores the economics and politics of the dictionary business. Perhaps too much Macdonald and not enough logo-geekery, but a well-researched, even loving, look at our language and its landlords.
