Music: Frankophlha

worry about orthography; in books of the time we might find a word spelled three different ways on a single page. As to usage, of course they cared about style—although they disagreed about what constituted good style, and Shakespeare himself repeatedly satirized the Euphuists. But had dictionaries been thought of, one can well imagine Shakespeare, Marlowe, Nashe, Greene, and the rest saying in effect what NR senior editor Willmoore Kendall once said to managing editor Suzanne La Follette: “Suzanne, we’re the people that the people who make dictionaries come to to find out what to put in them.” Consider the number of words and usages that appear in lesser dictionaries with the notation Shak., or for which Shakespeare is the first citation in the OED.

A semi-related quibble: Winchester asserts that the type for the OED was “all hand-set.” The making of so monumental a work would have taken much longer than it did had that been the case. In fact, much of it was set in Monotype, a more complex and flexible cousin of Linotype.

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Christopher Rapp

Mr. Rapp is a former member of the National Review editorial staff.

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worry about orthography; in books of the time we might find a word spelled three different ways on a single page. As to usage, of course they cared about style—although they disagreed about what constituted good style, and Shakespeare himself repeatedly satirized the Euphuists. But had dictionaries been thought of, one can well imagine Shakespeare, Marlowe, Nashe, Greene, and the rest saying in effect what NR senior editor Willmoore Kendall once said to managing editor Suzanne La Follette: “Suzanne, we’re the people that the people who make dictionaries come to to find out what to put in them.” Consider the number of words and usages that appear in lesser dictionaries with the notation Shak., or for which Shakespeare is the first citation in the OED.

A semi-related quibble: Winchester asserts that the type for the OED was “all hand-set.” The making of so monumental a work would have taken much longer than it did had that been the case. In fact, much of it was set in Monotype, a more complex and flexible cousin of Linotype.