by David Skinner (Get the Book)The editors of the New York Times breathed fire when they saw the word ain't in Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1961). However, Skinner brushes aside the Times' outrage to recover the story of how one brave editor, Philip Gove, dared to publish a dictionary documenting how language actually worked in twentieth-century America, not a carefully trimmed guide to linguistic etiquette. Chronicling the thinking that emboldened Gove, Skinner revisits early twentieth-century America to examine the tensions separating the genteel novelist Henry James, who deplored the slovenliness of American speech, from the populist Mark Twain, who relished the lawless energy of that speech. As a work championing Twain's perspective, H. L. Mencken's 1919 The American Language receives particular attention as an overdue recognition of the generative powers that informed the unvarnished rhetoric of Lincoln and the iconoclastic fiction of Theodore Dreiser. Skinner also limns the growing lexical impact of linguistics as an empirical science, not a set of regulatory grammar rules. Schooled in such science, Gove risked the publication of a revolutionary lexicon though Skinner allows readers to hear the howls of protest that the dictionary provoked before it finally won general acceptance. A compelling reminder of the cultural significance of words and word-making. --Booklist
