Volume 55, Number 20 · December 18, 2008
'If Shakespeare Had Been Able to Google...'
By James Gleick
Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics, and Essences; With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory
by Roy Blount Jr.
Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 364 pp., $25.00
Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages
by Ammon Shea
Perigee, 223 pp., $21.95
The First English Dictionary, 1604
by Robert Cawdrey, with an introduction by John Simpson
Oxford: Bodleian Library, 154 pp., $25.00
There have never been so many words, and we've never been so obsessed with them.
Review, 3742 words
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