Download or read book Unlocking the English Language written by R. W. Burchfield and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1992-12 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As we grapple with an English language adapting and expanding faster than ever, Robert Burchfield offers a sane, humanistic, and historically illuminating account of how words enter our official vocabulary. In this lively collection of essays, he shows us that dictionaries, far from being static, are hotly contested social documents resulting from the interaction of the language, the lexicographer, and his times. Drawing on the author's thirty years' experience as the editor of the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, this book gives us a firsthand account of the sorts of decisions lexicographers have confronted since Samuel Johnson's great dictionary (such as the uses of literary authority, the inclusion of "ethnic" vocabulary, the establishment of standard usage), as well as more contemporary issues, including the implications of compiling dictionaries in the computer age. There is also a wealth of insights into the history of our language, its rich past, and its potential future.--From publisher description.