Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Van Winkle's Return: Change in American English, 1966-1986 (review)

Van Winkle's Return: Change in American English, 1966-1986 (review) 222Reviews Douglas A. Kibbee Department of French University of Illinois * * * Kenneth G. Wilson. Van Winkle's Return: Change in American English, 1966-1986. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987. xii + 193 pp. Cloth ed. $18.00; paper ed. $10.95. Though it may not be apparent from the sub-title, Kenneth Wilson's book about change in American English is, at its core, a book about dictionaries. The title evokes Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle, who went to sleep in the American colonies and awoke after twenty years to find himself in the United States; Wilson's dormant years were those spent away from the classroom as a university administrator. A teacher once again, he found himself comparing the English of a new generation of students with the language he recollected from 1965 (including, presumably, that of the present reviewer, who had been among them). To pursue the comparison, he turned to his old desk dictionaries of the '50s and '60s and to the new desk dictionaries of the '80s to see how these books would illu- minate the changes he noticed. Wilson's earlier esteem for dictionaries led to a valuable reader, now out of print, that he wrote http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America Dictionary Society of North America

Van Winkle's Return: Change in American English, 1966-1986 (review)

Download PDF
3 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/dictionary-society-of-north-america/van-winkle-s-return-change-in-american-english-1966-1986-review-sREk09XMBU

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Dictionary Society of North America
Copyright
Copyright © The Dictionary Society of North America
ISSN
2160-5076
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

222Reviews Douglas A. Kibbee Department of French University of Illinois * * * Kenneth G. Wilson. Van Winkle's Return: Change in American English, 1966-1986. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987. xii + 193 pp. Cloth ed. $18.00; paper ed. $10.95. Though it may not be apparent from the sub-title, Kenneth Wilson's book about change in American English is, at its core, a book about dictionaries. The title evokes Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle, who went to sleep in the American colonies and awoke after twenty years to find himself in the United States; Wilson's dormant years were those spent away from the classroom as a university administrator. A teacher once again, he found himself comparing the English of a new generation of students with the language he recollected from 1965 (including, presumably, that of the present reviewer, who had been among them). To pursue the comparison, he turned to his old desk dictionaries of the '50s and '60s and to the new desk dictionaries of the '80s to see how these books would illu- minate the changes he noticed. Wilson's earlier esteem for dictionaries led to a valuable reader, now out of print, that he wrote

Journal

Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America – Dictionary Society of North America

Published: Apr 4, 1987

There are no references for this article.