Some
books are just so impressive, so powerful, so important that you tend to
overlook them. Take The American
Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fifth Edition, published by
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Published
in 2011, it updated an earlier edition from 2000. It is one of the longest books in book
publishing history. It is a hardcover,
8x10 volume, filled with 2,084 pages, retailing for $60. It contains so many words, terms, places, and
names of things and people that it is more like a dictionary-plus or an
encyclopedia-light. It packs a lot into
its tissue-thin pages that feature over 4,000 full-color images.
What’s
interesting is what changes from one edition to the next. One would think not much changes, but so much
changes in a short period of time. The
recent edition added 10,000 new words and terms, and rewrote thousands of
previously defined entries. It’s almost
too much to keep up with.
I
quote from the book’s introduction in regards to what this book, with several
hundred contributors, consultants, editors, researchers, and lexicographers had
to tackle:
“What
is the new material? Where does it all come from? From every walk of life and
every corner of the universe. For
example, there are new words from technology (like crowdsourcing, quantum
computer, and wikify) from medicine and physiology (like ghrelin, metabolome,
and MRSA), from astronomy (like Big Rip, exoplanet, and plutino), from biology
(like dulois, kermode, and xoloitzcuintli), from sports (like fakie,
kiteboarding, and muay thai), and from cooking (like kunefe, sancocho, and
zaatar). And there are loads of informal
and fun words like crop top, ginormous, ka-ching, yacay and wifty. New senses include the virtual-reality sense
of avatar, the Internet sense of cloud, the hamburger sense of slider, the
protein sense of lip and stage. This
tide of new linguistic phenomena is in many ways a measure of our collective
curiosity and creativity. It represents
who we are and where we are going. To not have access to this information is to
be isolated in our own culture.”
There
are a number of books that have become invaluable, reference guides and are
true classics. Strunk & White’s The Element’s of Style, Webster’s Dictionary,
and Chicago Manual of Style come to
mind. Books like these could be
duplicated by others, and indeed, there are many versions of dictionaries,
books of language style, and usage, but these are the leaders. They have a history of being the first and or
best at what they do.
Every
genre has its leading titles of the present and its classics from other eras,
but there is a favoritism to certain oldies but goodies, starting with
Shakespeare. Some books are so timeless,
so significant, so well done that new generations honor them by reading them
cover to cover.
There
are probably scores of books all writers should have access to, including The Guinness Book of World Records, The Bible, Roget’s Thesaurus, McGraw Hill’s
Dictionary Book of Idioms, Bartlett’s
Book of Quotations, The Almanac, and The
Writers’ Market. All of these books
get revised and updated, sometimes annually, and even The Bible gets
re-translated or re-formatted from time to time.
The
digital era would seem perfect for the above-mentioned books. Who needs to carry around a 10-pound book, right? Wrong.
These are the exact books meant for print. You hold them in your hands and you can
discover so many things that you otherwise would never know existed. Great
writers need great books – in print – close by at all times.
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