 Welcome to the Endless Knot. Today I'm doing something a bit different. Unboxing a dictionary! Okay, so I've ordered a dictionary and so I'm going to do an unboxing here. I'm going to open this up and see what we have and then we'll look at what it's like. So start off with my Odin letter opener. I could bring this. The book can be indented. There we go. The American Heritage Dictionary fifth edition. Very heavy box out of the way. As you can see it comes wrapped in plastic with a wrap around here. That's only halfway up the book, the dust jacket. Get the plastic off. It's a nice heavy weighty book. I'm glad it was wrapped in plastic. No one wants a dented hardcover book that ruins the aesthetic appearance of it. This is going to stay. Leave it there for now. As you can see on the back of the wrap around by the way the little advertising phrase that they use, you are your words. Never doubt your word choice again. That reflects the idea of prescriptivism. Make sure there is a right way of using language and a wrong way of using language. Make sure you don't get it wrong. If you subscribe to that view of language, well, this may be the dictionary for you. But on the descriptive side, they do also say get the latest research on word origins and histories. So that balances those two. It's a nice cloth bound cover. Let's open it up. The headwords themselves are printed in blue and the margins are used for full color images as well as additional information for pronunciation. Okay, so let me talk a little bit about the background of this dictionary and why in particular I wanted to order another copy of it or why it's particularly useful to the work that I'm doing. It was first published in 1969 in reaction to Webster's third, which was more permissive than previous editions had been. So what we're talking about is an issue here of prescriptivism versus descriptivism. The Webster's third was moving more towards a descriptive kind of approach and this upset some people who thought the language was going to hell in a handbasket. And so this was the motivation for creating this new dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary, to be more particular about its permissiveness in terms of what was allowed in language. And so it contains usage information, usage notes for words that, according to the panel that they convened, to decide on collectively what was going to be the quote unquote correct usage of different types of words. So this usage panel made decisions on these topics. And that information is incorporated into the very first edition of the American Heritage Dictionary. But it also on the sort of more descriptive side pioneered the use of corpus linguistics to gather information about the language and how it was used. And this made it a very good dictionary in its own right. And then here's the usage panel. So chaired by cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker. So let's look at some of the interesting names on the usage panel here, just sort of scrolling through. Well, a Canadian, Margaret Atwood, Canadian writer. We have Allison Bechdel. Here's John McWhorter, linguist. Alice Monroe, another Canadian fiction writer. There's Antonin Scalia, justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. So there's the conservative end of language use, I guess. One of the nice features is, at the beginning of each letter, we have this nice graphic at the top, which gives us not only the sort of kind of modern typeface version of the letter, but the historical development of the letter themselves. So Phoenician, Greek, and then the Roman form. You can see how the letters themselves have evolved over time. That's a nice feature. And it is also notable for its appendix. So if we flip to the end of the book, so this is appendix one, Indo-European roots. So this lists all of the Indo-European roots that are connected to the etymologies in the main part of the dictionary. So the main part of the dictionary will give you the etymology, and then it will point you to the Indo-European root, which you can then look up in the back of the book. There it is, Semitic root. So that wasn't there in the first edition, that didn't come in until the fourth edition. But we have it here in the fifth edition as well. So for instance, here we have an Indo-European root albo, meaning white. This was an Indo-European root that I discussed in a number of videos back when I talked about the word album. So it says, derivatives include elf, oaf, albino. And then it talks about the different branches of Proto-European. So how it comes in through, for instance, Germanic through different forms, different sound changes. So we get all these other words here, like obeyed, auburn, dob. They're all listed there. The organizing principle in this dictionary, in terms of how the senses are arranged, they're arranged in order of sort of centrality and frequency. So they'll put the most common use of the word first, and then sort of move out from there to less common or less central meanings for any given word. This is not, of course, the only arrangement. So historical dictionary, like the Oxford English dictionary, arranges the senses historically, the earliest sense of the word to later and later developments, later and later senses. Let's look up a few words. So here's one that often causes some problems, hopefully. So sense one, in a hopeful manner, and then they give a sample sentence, we began our journey, hopefully. And then sense two, which they tag as a usage problem, hopefully in the sense of it is to be hoped. The usage panel thinks it's incorrect. And so following the word itself, we have this usage note, which they say, when used as a sentence adverb, as in hopefully the measures will be adopted, hopefully has been roundly criticized since the 1960s, when it saw a sudden increase in use. It is not easy to explain why people selected this word for disparagement. Its use can be justified by the similar use of many other adverbs, such as mercifully and frankly, opposition continues to run high or even higher to this usage than it did in the 1960s. In our 1968 survey, 44% of the usage panel approved the usage. This dropped to 27% in our 1986 survey. We asked the question again in 1999 and 34% accepted the sentence. Hopefully the treaty will be ratified while 22% accepted the adverb when placed at the end of a sentence. Hopefully seems to have taken on a life of its own as a sign that the writer is unaware of the cannons of usage. So that's the kind of usage information you'll get from the American Heritage Dictionary. In addition to the brief etymologies, one of the other features that you find in this dictionary are some longer word histories. So we'll look at some examples of those. All right, here's the entry for the word beef. So it gives the etymology from Middle English, ultimately from Latin, and then it gives us a reference to the Proto-Indo-European root. But it also includes one of these longer word history sections where there's a particularly interesting etymology. They have a more, they have a lengthier description or discussion of that etymology. So thanks for watching. I'll be back soon with more etymological explorations and cultural connections. So please subscribe to this channel.