I stopped by Barnes & Noble today (it's located on Dell Range, adjacent to Red Lobster on one side and the Tokyo Bowl on the other), and picked up a book called Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages, by Ammon Shea.
I wouldn't have paid full price for it - $21.95 - but it was "bargain priced" for $4.98 and so I picked it up.
It's kind of fun...a book full of words that no one would ever use in real life, but that are just fun to know.
Here's the description from the book cover:
"If you are interested in vocabulary that is both spectacularly useful and beautifully useles, read on...I have read the OED so that you don't have to."
So begins Ammon Shea's tireless, word-obsessed, and more than slightly masochistic journey.
The word lover's Mount Everest, the Oxford English Dictionary has enthralled logophiles since its initial publication more than eighty years ago. Weighing in at 137 pounds, it is the dictionary to end all dictionaries.
Who would set out to read this massive work in its entirety? Only a man as obsessed, coffee-fueled and verbally inclined as Ammon Shea.
In twenty-six chapters marked by a documentarian's keen eye and filled with sharp wit and sheer delight, Shea shares his year inside the OED, delivering a hair-pulling, eye-crossing account of reading every word, and revealing the most obscure, hilarious, oddly useful, and exquisitely useless gems he discovers along the way.
Filled with lexocographical revelations and miscellaneous marginalia, Reading the OED is a feast forword lovers...and just might be the death of Ammon Shea.
http://www.AmmonShea.com
No comments:
Post a Comment