rdf-syntax-grammar
mods:
  schema location: http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
  title info:
    title: Hardly harmless drudgery
    sub title: a 500-year pictorial history of the lexicographic geniuses, sciolists, plagiarists & obsessives who defined the English language
  name:
    name part: Garner, Bryan A.
    role:
      role term: creator
    role:
      role term: author.
  name:
    name part: Lynch, Jack (John T.)
    role:
      role term: author.
  type of resource: text
  genre: bibliography
  origin info:
    place:
      place term: mau
    date issued: 2024
    copyright date: 2024
    issuance: monographic
  language:
    language term: eng
  physical description:
    form: print
    extent: xxviii, 514 pages : chiefly color illustrations ; 25 cm.
  abstract: An illustrated history of the dictionary and the many obsessed compilers, charlatans and geniuses, who made them. Dictionaries are repositories of erudition, monuments to linguistic authority and battlefields in cultural and political struggles. They are works of almost superhuman endurance, produced by people who devote themselves for years or even decades to wearisome labor. Dictionaries can become commodities in a fiercely competitive publishing business, and they can keep a business afloat for generations or sink it swiftly. They are also often beautiful objects, typographically innovative, designed to project learning and authority. The painstaking work of corralling, recording and defining the vocabulary of a language has inspired best-selling books, both fiction and nonfiction, and even two major motion pictures. This is the dictionary's story. The book tells the stories behind great works of scholarship but, more important, it tells the stories of the people behind them-their prodigious endurance, their nationalist fervor, their philological elucubrations haphazardly mixed with crackpot theories, their petty rivalries and their sometimes irrational conduct and visceral hatreds. Most of Hardly Harmless Drudgery will be a chronological narrative, covering more than half a millennium from the late fifteenth century to the early twenty-first. This main chronological narrative will occasionally pause for digressions on the themes and questions that arise throughout the history of lexicography. Endurance and delayed gratification, for instance, are necessary virtues for any successful lexicographer. Samuel Johnson, working with the aid of only a few copyists, did in nine years what the forty"immortels" of l'Académie française could not do in less than forty. And the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains roughly 38 million words of text-about fifty times the length of the King James Bible. Not that publishers always welcome such large and slow-mov…
  table of contents: Primordial beginnings -- A kind of dawning -- The conventional start -- The early 18th century -- The age of authority -- Linguistic independence & its sequelae -- Lexical warfare -- The OED era -- What's a guardian to do? -- Offbeat English -- The digital age.
  note: Bryan A. Garner and Jack Lynch.
  note: Color illustrations on endpapers.
  note: This book accompanies the book exhibition 'Hardly Harmless Drudgery,' originally mounted at the Grolier Club in New York City (Spring/Summer 2024).
  note: Includes bibliographical references and index.
  subject:
    topic: English language
    topic: Lexicography
  subject:
    topic: English language
    topic: Lexicography
    genre: Pictorial works
  classification: PE1611 .G37 2024
  classification: 423.092/2
  identifier: 9781567928075
  identifier: 1567928072
  identifier: 2023052330
  record info:
    record content source: DLC
    record creation date: 231220
    record change date: 20240701205410.8
    record identifier: in00004794119