Sticktoitiveness
John Sutherland, 8 June 1995
Empire of Words: The Reign of the ‘OED’
by John Willinsky.
Princeton, 258 pp., £19.95, November 1994,0 691 03719 1 Show More
by John Willinsky.
Princeton, 258 pp., £19.95, November 1994,
“... the Shorter Oxford and Webster, as a Bible on matters linguistic. Nor, one imagines, could a post-Willinsky scholar do what Raymond Williams did in the Fifties and base a major intellectual enterprise on the confident assumption that OED represents ‘a systematic, reliable and comprehensive history of the English vocabulary’ – raw lexical material. In ... ”