Art and Style | July 19, 2009 | 4 comments

The Most Controversial Dictionary in the English Language

source: http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2009-07/Webster.html

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"At first glance, the controversy over Webster’s Third seems to symbolize a lurch in American culture from a late fifties’ respect for standards to a sixties’ rebellion against establishment values. The ensuing debate over the dictionary’s methodology did owe much to the anxiety of midcentury intellectuals about the rise of a national popular culture, as attested to by the involvement of Dwight Macdonald, who became the definitive critic of Webster’s Third. But the dictionary-bashing that began in 1961 has continued well beyond America’s shift from square to hip. In 2001, Harper’s magazine published a cover story by David Foster Wallace that contained a fresh assault on Webster’s Third and its editor, Philip Gove. Like many earlier critiques, it showed little understanding of the thinking that went into Webster’s Third. It was unique, however, in its brazen misrepresentation of the book itself."

Can any dictionary be as powerful as Diderot's Encyclopédie? Science has proven that language shapes the way we think. Can a dictionary have a big enough effect to shift conscious thought? Or is this all academic?
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4 comments // The Most Controversial Dictionary in the English Language

  • TenGig
    • 0
      TenGig  

    • Are you seriously trying to compare a dictionary to an encyclopedia? You might as well say that "no sculpture will ever be as powerful as the discovery of the genome".

      Good article though, and a fine example how malleable the English language is, and why so many native users have such difficulty with it.

    • 2 years ago
  • St_Alia_10191
    • 0
      St_Alia_10191  
    • TenGig:

      I was referring to Diderot's Encyclopédie. Not many people know about it, they don't teach it in school until you get to college, but it was an incendiary piece of literature. Diderot was one of the first true atheists, and the definitions he put in the book reflected that. Naturally the establishment in France didn't like that too much.

    • 2 years ago
  • St_Alia_10191
  • TabulaRasa
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