Product Description: Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum offers unique insight into the works of Samuel Johnson by re-considering William Hazlitt's oft-cited comparison between Johnson's prose and a pendulum. In 1819, William Hazlitt condemned Samuel Johnson's prose style as 'a species of rhyming' in which 'the close of the period follows as mechanically as the oscillation of a pendulum, the sense is balanced with the sound'...read more

Product Description: Dictionaries are far more than works which list the words and meanings of a language. In this Very Short Introduction, Lynda Mugglestone shows that all dictionaries are partial and all are selective--human products that reflect the dominant social and cultural assumptions of the time in which they were written...read more

Pronunciation in Britain acts as an image of identity laden with social and cultural sensitivities. In "Talking Proper," Mugglestone studies the shifts in attitudes to language (and in language itself) which, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, came to influence the rise of many still current peculiarities of English speech.

Examines the hidden history through which the Oxford English Dictionary came into being in a study that traces the personal battles involved in chronicling an ever-changing language.

Product Description: The Oxford English Dictionary occupies a special place in the history of English, cultural as well as linguistic. This collection sets out to explore the pioneering endeavors in both lexicography and lexicology which led to the making of its first edition...read more