|
Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages | 
| Author: Ammon Shea
Publisher: Perigee Trade
Category: Book
List Price: $21.95
Buy New: $14.27
You Save: $7.68 (35%)
Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 14567
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.7 x 0.9
ISBN: 0399533982
Dewey Decimal Number: 423.028
EAN: 9780399533983
Publication Date: July 2, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
|
| Similar Items:
| • | Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meaning | | • | Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, ... With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory | | • | The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society | | • | The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives | | • | The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English |
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
An obsessive word lovers account of reading the Oxford English Dictionary cover to cover.
Im reading the OED so you dont have to. If you are interested in vocabulary that is both spectacularly useful and beautifully useless, read on...
So reports Ammon Shea, the tireless, word-obsessed, and more than slightly masochistic author of Reading the OED. The word lovers Mount Everest, the OED has enthralled logophiles since its initial publication 80 years ago. Weighing in at 137 pounds, it is the dictionary to end all dictionaries.
In 26 chapters filled with sharp wit, sheer delight, and a documentarians keen eye, Shea shares his year inside the OED, delivering a hair-pulling, eye-crossing account of reading every word, and revealing the most obscure, hilarious, and wonderful gems he discovers along the way.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...
 "The Letter 'I' Tastes Like It Is Full Of Capers, And I Hate Capers." August 30, 2008
21 out of 22 found this review helpful
The concept of reading the OED cover to cover simply boggles the mind, but Ammon Shea is a unique person: a man so devoted to dictionaries that 21 of the 25 boxes of belongings he brought with him when moving into his latest apartment were full of them. Shea shares with the reader insights both personal and linguistically entertaining throughout the book, and discusses many of his favorite words from the OED.
Some of my favorite words discussed in "Reading the OED" follow.
"Advesperate" means "to approach evening." I join Shea in hoping I never have the need to exclaim "Let's hurry! It's advesperating!"
"Natiform" means "buttock-shaped." I do not know when I will need this word, but I have filed it mentally under the heading "potentially useful."
"Nastify" means "to render nasty." This is a word that has obvious and numerous uses in discussing contemporary culture.
"Peristeronic" means "suggestive of pigeons," and may be my favorite word in the book inasmuch as I cannot imagine a single time I will ever need this word.
"Tricoteuse" is an even less useful word than peristeronic, in that it means "a woman who knits; specifically, a woman who during the French Revolution would attend the guillotinings and knit while the heads were rolling." Now that's cold.
I was also pleased to discover that "chalcenterous" means "having bowels made of bronze," or alternately, "tough." This is a word that I simply must remember and use at every reasonable opportunity.
Shea is clearly a lover of language, and holds lexicographers and linguists in high regard, but he writes for those of us with smaller vocabularies in an amusing and simultaneously educational manner that is never patronizing. Perhaps the best example of this is the discussion on p. 168 where he discusses the difference in technical words with precise definitions (e.g., "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis," a rare lung disease), and the difficulty of defining small, common words, his favorite example of which is "set." The definition of "set" in the OED takes 25 pages, and covers 155 main senses of the word, some of which have up to 70 subsenses. These are truths that are obvious to lexicographers, but are uncommonly recognized outside of professional word-defining circles. These are also the underlying points that make this book so entertaining and worthwhile.
For anyone who loves to read or loves words, this is an absolute necessity. While I doubt I'll ever read the OED, I'm glad that someone has and has written such a clever book about the experience.
A Book to be Savored July 16, 2008
15 out of 15 found this review helpful
Words still matter. I'm taking it slowly so that I can spend time with Mr. Shea's selections from the OED. Here's a word that is worth the price of the book: "Acnestis (n.) On an animal, the point of the back that lies between the shoulders and the lower back, which cannot be reached to be scratched." I've known the concept existed from my cats' reaction when I give them a scratch there. Mr. Shea and the OED have provided the word. A great read and that includes his entertaining description of the effort required to actually *read the OED*. Ammon Shea *read* the OED (bears repeating); we're the beneficiaries.
Great fun for the word lover August 5, 2008
12 out of 14 found this review helpful
Nicholson Baker has written a wonderful review for "The New York Times" of Ammon Shea's travel report on his journey through the OED in Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. Shea preferred the joys of the printed page to the computerized OED, and he traveled through The Oxford English Dictionary (20 Volume Set) to experience the tactile joys of turning pages. Here's a way to experience the joys of ink and paper by reading Shea's book and by using the computer to enrich the experience.
Baker and Shea both liked the word "acnestis", the part of an animal's back it can't reach to scratch. As a farm boy, we provided scratching posts for cattle and a vet taught me the word. The OED online version gives two First Quotations for the word: 1807 in Edin. Med. & Phys. Dict. II. Suppl. and 1927 Observer 3 Apr., "That spot known to crossword solvers as the acnestis."
Charlotte Brewer's Treasure-House of the Language: The Living OED describes how the OED is using online resources to enrich their entries, including the First Quotations. A quick check of Google Books doesn't turn up an earlier quotation for "acnestis", but as Brewer writes, the OED welcomes contributions. (My personal best -- "jerry built" -- may have pushed back the word history over ten years earlier than the OED's First Quotation.) The 40 odd Google Book entries for "acnestis" range from dictionaries to medical texts to lists of 25,000 words less than ten letters long for use of telegraphers (a surprisingly popular word in the era of telegraphy I thought).
Closer to home, searching on the word "acnestis" on Amazon turns up Braun-Falco's Dermatology, page 991, where one learns that the acnestis can be identified in humans by the "reverse butterfly sign". In What's What: The Encyclopedia Of Pointless Information, page 355, one learns that right handed people tend to scratch with their left hand and vice versa. There's even a volume of poetry on offer by Chris Tutton -- ACNESTIS IN ELYSIUM.
I haven't even touched on the riches on Google itself, with over 680 hits this morning, including Webster's 1828 definition: "ACNESTIS, n. [Gr. a priv. to rub or gnaw.] That part of the spine in quadrupeds which extends from the metaphrenon, between the shoulder blades, to the loins; which the animal cannot reach to scratch." The OED used the word to announce its online version in 2000: "If you can think of something that you don't know the word for, use the proximity search and you may be able to find it - discover that the spot on your shoulder blade that is sometimes difficult to scratch is called an 'acnestis'." Even Google News chimes in from Malaysia on an election cycle: "... , the last five months have felt like an acnestis upon our collective soul; like that little patch of skin on our backs that we just can't reach to scratch ourselves. It's irritating. It's annoying. It's left us reaching and spinning around in circles."
There are many more words to explore following Shea's footsteps through his fascinating book. If interest flags from time to time, one can always take up A. J. Jacobs's The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World, and explore a similar journey through the "Encyclopedia Britannica".
Robert C. Ross 2008
"One would have to be mad to seriously consider such an undertaking." August 24, 2008
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
Ammon Shea's "Reading the OED" is a paean to the English language, with all of its "glories and foibles, the grand concepts and whimsical conceits that make our language what it is." Shea readily admits that "adding a great number of obscure words to your vocabulary will not help you advance in the world." Although he has been reading dictionaries for a decade in between jobs as a furniture mover in New York City, Shea had never attempted to read the Mt. Everest of dictionaries, the twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary, with its twenty-one thousand seven hundred and thirty pages and approximately fifty-nine million words. When he made up his mind to tackle this daunting task, he did it with great anticipation and not a little dread. However, he need not have worried that he would come to regret his folly. Not only is the OED an enormously scholarly work, says Shea, but it is also "entertaining and wonderfully engaging." In "Reading the OED," Shea gives us a taste of what it is like to undertake such a monumental project and introduces us to words that are both "spectacularly useful and beautifully useless."
Shea divides his book into twenty-six chapters, one for each letter of the alphabet. Every chapter begins with either a riff on the history of dictionaries or a description of the author's feelings and experiences during his year with the OED. For each letter, Shea offers a list of words culled from the OED that are sometimes silly, often unpronounceable, but usually engaging and out of the ordinary. He does not merely define words such as "advesperate," "onomatomania," and "latibulatek," but he also provides comical commentary that will make readers grin and, at times, laugh out loud. Shea is an amusing first person narrator who enjoys poking fun at himself as much as he loves finding remarkable words. He fuels himself with gallons of coffee and closets himself in a library's basement in order to accomplish what some might consider a dubious feat. Shea spends eight to ten hours daily at his "job," and before long, he begins to suffer from eyestrain, pounding headaches, back pain and occasionally, crushing boredom. However, the rewards make it all worthwhile. He is pleasantly surprised at the OED's ability to evoke happiness, sadness, surprise, wistfulness, and chagrin. "All of the human emotions and experiences are there in this dictionary," he insists. "They just happen to be alphabetized." Logophiles (word-lovers) will revel in this breezy, informative, and compulsively readable book.
Great read July 23, 2008
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
Highly recommended! Ammon Shea paints a picture of himself as an obsessed, voracious, and enamored reader, but he also comes across as modest, loving, and introspective. His weird need to read and read and read transforms him into a true lover of the deep work of art that the OED seems to be (how should I know? I never read it! But I take his word). No one can know words like he does, but he lets us in on his love, and by the time we're done we deeply admire and appreciate both the OED and Mr Shea himself.
This book reminds me of Henry Miller's "The Books in My Life" (but it's more like "The BOOK in My Life"): passionate, biographical, an ode to literature and the quirky, loving individual...
|
|
|
|
Copyright 2008 BetterEditor.net
| |
