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Chasing the Sun: Dictionary-Makers and the Dictionaries They Made
by: Jonathon Green

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Collectible Price: $30.00
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 413.02809
EAN: 9780805034660
ISBN: 0805034668
Label: Henry Holt & Co
Manufacturer: Henry Holt & Co
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 510
Publication Date: 1996-11
Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
Sales Rank: 998674
Studio: Henry Holt & Co

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
A history of the dictionary reveals the reasons behind the creations of dictionaries, the motivations of their creators, how their biases seep into their work, and their works effect on us. 12,500 first printing.

Amazon.com Review:
Word-collecting is an ancient practice that began nearly 4,500 years ago in pre-Babylonian Sumer. In Chasing the Sun, prominent British lexicographer Jonathon Green gives an account of his kind, tracing the history of dictionary making from the clay tablet to the CD-ROM. Green also examines--and debunks--the so-called impartiality of lexicographers. No matter how zealously they may protest, dictionary makers are never the passive recipients of linguistic law. They do have an agenda. As Green puts it, they are always 'playing God. Or if not God, then at least Moses, descending from Sinai with the tablets of the law.'

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- an enormous amount of interesting, useful information
. . .the first fourteen chapters. . .gather in one place an enormous amount of interesting, useful information about (deceased) lexicographers and the dictionaries they prepared.

as reviewed by Laurence Urdang in the Winter 1997 issue (Vol. XXIII, No. 3) of VERBATIM, The Language Quarterly.

Rating:

- Lexicographers as priests -- and people
On the surface, dictionary-making seems like an unlikely subject for a history intended for anyone other than specialists to read. Yet Jonathon Green succeeds in leading the reader to appreciate, first, that dictionary-makers serve an important role as arbiters of the language we use to shape our lives, and second, that they are not "harmless drudges" (in Samuel Johnson's memorable phrase), but people with colorful, even strange, backgrounds.

Green has several objects in his history. One of the primary ones is to elevate the lexicographer from drudge to priest. He points particularly to America in the nineteenth century as a land where immigrants and lower-class people wanted to be told how to speak and write properly in order to advance in society. They looked to dictionaries and their makers as the arbiters of what counted as "correct" language. Green argues that America has generally tended toward ... Read More

Rating:

- An entertaining meander down the byways of English letters
As a lexicographer, Jonathon Green is brave, foolish or honest. Chasing The Sun presents his fellow abecedarians in a poor light: querulous, conceited, or mad. Photius, the ninth century Byzantine scholar, used to respond to his friends1 letters by correcting their grammar. (He was also the first book reviewer.) Dr WC Minor, who defined tens of thousands of words for the OED, did his work from Broadmoor after being driven mad by the American Civil War and killing a stoker in Lambeth. Noah Webster bowdlerised the Bible. In many cases, the idiosyncrasies of lexicographers are amplified by the insecure economics of the profession. Dictionary-making takes years, if done painstakingly and well, and a lexicographer with no other source of income must beg and scrape where he can. (Hence Johnson's celebrated rebuke to Chesterfield, willing to shell out more than 10 pounds only once the work was nearly completed: "Is not a ... Read More

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