[TenTec] Our Language of English

[Jim Reid]

Hello all,

The following bit from an earlier post stimulated my
comments below:

> Puck,
>
> Concerning your "black powDer" "boo-boo" -- that's OK; If this were an
> English Comp class another message would be the champ for having >EGG on
its Vibroplex. In his comments on the Blue Racer Mike N4NT >wrote about
"The YOLK which holds the armature": shouldn't that be >YOKE? Fortunately,
L. L. Miller (my comp prof from college) isn't reading >this reflector......

Off the reflector topic,  but,  if you want a really fun read about how
the spelling and meaning of our English language words at last
came to be "set",  go  check out from your library the new book:

    "The Professor and the Madman",  Simon Winchester,

HarperCollinsPublishers.  This is an amazing tale of getting
the language correct!  Shakespeare had no word guide to
either usage nor spelling!  In fact,  none existed,  and there
was not even in the language the concept of "looking a word
up"!  The same held  true during the time of the works of
Francis Drake,  Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, Christopher
Marlowe,  Ben Johnson and all the other of their near
contemporaries!  About 150 years after Shakespeare had
finished the "Twelfth Night",  probably about 1601,  after
some six years effort,  Samuel Johnson,  after much
complaining by the likes of Alexander Pope,  Daniel Defoe,
and Jonothan Swift (author of Gulliver's Travels) about the
need to "fix" the language,  published the first attempt
at a real English language dictionary which attempted to
not only list the "hard" words,  but all words in use in the
language!  But this was not the real final word on the
language.  For that another hundred years was to pass,
when another attempt would begin,  and about 70 years
later,  in the early 1920's the multi-volume Oxford
English Dictionary would be published and become the
definitive source of use, examples,  spelling,  and sources of
all known English language words.  And it has been kept
updated with added supplemental volumes to this day!

Have a look for the book mentioned above for the amazing
story of how this has come to be,  and how it continues to
be modulated by the way we use the language  daily.

73,  Jim,  KH7M
On the Garden Island of Kauai


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