Product Description

Objective and comprehensive, Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage is a readable and entertaining guide to the complext history of some of the thorniest usage issues in the English language. The scholarship and authority of this indispensale work have earned it universal critical acclaim.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #59286 in Books
• Published on: 1994-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 978 pages

About the Author

The Merriam brothers desired a continuity of editorship that would link Noah Webster's efforts with their own editions, so they selected Chauncey A. Goodrich, Webster's son-in-law and literary heir, who had been trained in lexicography by Webster himself, to be their editor in chief. Webster's son William also served as an editor of that first Merriam-Webster dictionary, which was published on September 24, 1847.

Although Webster's work was honored, his big dictionaries had never sold well. The 1828 edition was priced at a whopping $20; in 13 years its 2,500 copies had not sold out. Similarly, the 1841 edition, only slightly more affordable at $15, moved slowly. Assuming that a lower price would increase sales, the Merriams introduced the 1847 edition at $6, and although Webster's heirs initially questioned this move, extraordinary sales that brought them $250,000 in royalties over the ensuing 25 years convinced them that the Merriams' decision had been abundantly sound.

The first Merriam-Webster dictionary was greeted with wide acclaim. President James K. Polk, General Zachary Taylor (hero of the Mexican War and later president himself), 31 U.S. senators, and other prominent people hailed it unreservedly. In 1850 its acceptance as a resource for students began when Massachusetts ordered a copy for every school and New York placed a similar order for 10,000 copies to be used in schools throughout the state. Eventually school use would spread throughout the country. In becoming America's most trusted authority on the English language, Merriam-Webster dictionaries had taken on a role of public responsibility demanded of few other publishing companies. 

Customer Reviews

Superb research, sound usage information, great value!
This is the finest work of scholarship on English grammar and usage I have ever seen, in thirty years of doing research on English grammar. One grouchy reviewer on this page gives it a one-star put-down and grumbles that it is unreliable, advocating a return to Fowler, or Strunk and White. Don't believe it. The stiff and constricting prescriptions of those older works are in fact often unfounded. The third edition of Fowler (prepared by Burchfield) is not an improvement, and actually gets grammatical points wrong (and I means things like giving examples that are not in fact examples of the point at issue). The Merriam-Webster book is on a different level of scholarship. The example collection is magnificent, the analysis is intelligent and accurate, and where it says something is now acceptable literate usage you can trust it. Of course, if you want silly advice, like "never end a sentence with a preposition" or "never split an infinitive", you won't find it: there are irrational prejudices in the English usage field, and this book lends them no support. But this is because it demands EVIDENCE and ARGUMENT concerning the points it treats; it is not content simply to pass on dogmas and myths from past centuries. I was particularly struck by the fantastic value of this book: Amazon brought it to my door for shipping included -- and this is a 990-page large-format hardback! BUY THIS BOOK. You can't afford not to if you have any serious interest in English grammar.

Scholarly research, authoritative yet cautious discussion, and vast bredth and depth.
Peruse the bookstore sections on Grammar and Usage, and you'll see there has never been a lack of experts who want to tell you how to write. But the problem with just about every one of these books is that their explanations of grammatical phenomenona are misleading: they're not researched at all. In fact, they're not so much based on English as real writers actually use it, so much as they're based on how the writer fancies everyone ought to use it.

But "Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage" is the only guide to grammar and usage I've found that's worth a damn. Along with Joseph Williams's "Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace", this is the only book in the genre that I would recommend. Too many books in this genre have little to say that hasn't already been said a thousand times, and they're just too hyper-focused on mistakes, a focus which has a way of inculcating a sort of paranoia amongst writers who follow the one-size-fits-all dictums too rigidly. Imagine the way a runner might tip-toe through a minefield. That's the kind of writing these other books bread.

"English usage today is a discourse", this book begins, and that key observation is central to its approach. This observation might seem obvious to some, but almost every other grammar book (Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style" and Diana Hacker's "Rules for Writers", for instance) is written in a bubble outside of this discourse, and they read like theirs is first, and the definitive treatise on correctitude in English. This is the grammar book tradition, which sadly has changed very little in the past 300 years (See Haussamen's "Revising the Rules" for discussion). "Merriam Webster's" diverges from the grammar book tradition by stepping back and summarizing the history of the discourse in a way that puts modern quibbles in a perspective that's sorely missing. It turns out that most contemporary controversies are nothing new; they date back decades, if not centuries. The authors cite liberally from language commentators and armchair grammarians, often in ways that make the "experts" sound clownish. For instance, the authors note how commentators have been wrongly predicting the deaths of the subjunctive and of "whom" for over a century.

This is not a book for those who want over-simplified pronouncements of what's "right" and what's "wrong". Correctness is not a binary, it's a polarity. But "Merriam Webster's" never falls into the correct/incorrect trap, because the authors are grounded in the systematic study of language. How refreshing! The truth is that the writers of most grammar books are not linguists-they're just writers. And that means that they're out of their ballpark when they try to explain the maddening complexities of the English language.

Whereas other grammar books like to fabricate example sentences to fit their prescriptions, "Merriam Webster's" bases all its claims on real-life usage. 20,000+ illustrative citations show how respected writers actually use English. What's most interesting is that for every tsk-tsk rule of writing that your seventh grade English teacher might have taught you, this book provides ample examples of writers that follow them, and writers that flout them. Thanks to the authors' diligent research, we can see that Shakespeare would have failed a quiz on how we are traditionally taught to use "who" and "whom".

An alphabetical listing of 2,300+ entries covers just about every sticking point in the English language that any language-watcher has ever commented on. I've read dozens of grammar and usage guides (which never agree on what should be listed) and "Merriam Webster's" covers every single controversy I've heard, plus many I never imagined existed. Even seemingly uncontroversial words like "claim" and "gap" have made it into this book. More complicated usages-such as the choice of objective or nominative pronoun-are broken into separate sub-issues. The discussions are scholarly and objective. They steer clear of those imperatives and directives that are part of the grammar book tradition, and instead allow you to draw your own informed conclusions.

A Book for the Curious and not for the Ignorant
In one of the earlier reviews of this book the entry for "at" was misrepresented. I thought I would take some time to set the record straight. The entry for "at" is on page 141. It notes that usage writers from Vizetelly in 1906 onward have written disapprovingly about the use of the preposition "at" somewhere in the vicinity of and especially after the adverb where. The entry goes on to say that this is evidently chiefly an Americanism (attested by the OED Supplement and entered in the Dictionary of American Regional English), but not entirely unknown in British dialects. Scholarly works such as the Oxford English Dictionary, and the Dictionary of American Regional English are cited as well as citations from the Merriam Webster files. The evidence shows the idiom to be nearly nonexistent in discursive prose, although it occurs in letters and transcriptions of speech and there citations given from and Joel Chandler Harris, Flannery O'Connor. The entry gives an analysis of current usage saying that "at" at the end of pronominal phrase beginning with where serves to provide a word at the end of the sentence that can be given stress. It tends to follow a noun or pronoun to which the verb has been elided, as in this utterance by an editor here at the dictionary factory: "Have any idea where Kathy's at?" Then the entry has some conclusions and recommendation "You will note that at cannot simply be omitted; the 's must be expanded to is to produce an idiomatic sentence if the at is to be avoided." Frankly, there is nothing controversial about this, and information provided is accurate, reliable and verifiable. At the end of article is a note to see the entry labeled "Where ...At" for information about the mid 20th century use idiom. This article is on page 955 follows the pattern of the earlier one. There is the history of the usage issue, followed by a history of the idiom, and examples of actual usage, from Cyra McFadden, Paul Mazursky, quoted in Christian Science Monitor, Charles M. Young, Hunter S. Thompson, Dr. Gordon K. Davies, and Gunther S. Stent. Then come the conclusions and recommendations which are that "where it's at" and like phrases "continue to be used today, although they have some of the passe quality of old slang....Other than in these phrases, "at" almost never occurs after where in writing from standard sources." The Merriam Webster Dictionary of English Usage has more in common with the historical English grammars by Metzner, Sweet, Poutsma, Jespersen, Kruisinga and Curme, and the large standard reference grammars by the team of Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik then the run of the mill usage guide that is hawked to the uninformed. You should not let the casual tone of the writing fool you. The information given is accurate, verifiable and reliable.