21 October 2009

From the New York Times’ “On Language” column, Ammon Shea on old dictionaries:

As people increasingly rely on Internet dictionaries and other online reference works, it seems that passing down an ancestral book will become more and more of a rarity and that keeping older versions of these books will become exclusively the province of the professional and the persnickety. Although who knows? Perhaps one day a child shown a dictionary will be told, “This is the very same HTML that your grandfather read when he was your age.”