David Skinner – författare

“It takes true brilliance to lift the arid tellings of lexicographic fussing into the readable realm of the thriller and the bodice-ripper….David Skinner has done precisely this, taking a fine story and honing it to popular perfection.”—Simon Winchester, New York Times bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman

The Story of Ain’t by David Skinner is the captivating true chronicle of the creation of Merriam Webster’s Third New International Dictionary in 1961, the most controversial dictionary ever published. Skinner’s surprising and engaging, erudite and witty account will enthrall fans of Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman and The Meaning of Everything, and The Know-It-All by A.J. Jacobs, as it explores a culture in transition and the brilliant, colorful individuals behind it. The Story of Ain’t is a smart, often outrageous, and altogether remarkable tale of how egos, infighting, and controversy shaped one of America’s most authoritative language texts, sparking a furious language debate that the late, great author David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest) once called “the Fort Sumter of the Usage Wars.” 

“It takes true brilliance to lift the arid tellings of lexicographic fussing into the readable realm of the thriller and the bodice-ripper….David Skinner has done precisely this, taking a fine story and honing it to popular perfection.”

—Simon Winchester, New York Times bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman

The captivating, delightful, and surprising story of Merriam Webster’s Third Edition, the dictionary that provoked America’s greatest language controversy. In those days, Webster’s Second was the great gray eminence of American dictionaries, with 600,000 entries and numerous competitors but no rivals. It served as the all-knowing guide to the world of grammar and information, a kind of one-stop reference work.

In 1961, Webster’s Third came along and ignited an unprecedented controversy in America’s newspapers, universities, and living rooms. The new dictionary’s editor, Philip Gove, had overhauled Merriam’s long held authoritarian principles to create a reference work that had “no traffic with…artificial notions of correctness or authority. It must be descriptive not prescriptive.” Correct use was determined by how the language was actually spoken, and not by “notions of correctness” set by the learned few. Dwight MacDonald, a formidable American critic and writer, emerged as Webster’s Third’s chief nemesis when in the pages of the New Yorker he likened the new dictionary to the end of civilization..

The Story of Ain’t describes a great cultural shift in America, when the voice of the masses resounded in the highest halls of culture, when the division between highbrow and lowbrow was inalterably blurred, when the humanities and its figureheads were shunted aside by advances in scientific thinking. All the while, Skinner treats the reader to the chippy banter of the controversy’s key players. A dictionary will never again seem as important as it did in 1961.

Racial and ethnic categories have appeared in recent scientific work in novel ways and in relation to a variety of disciplines: medicine, forensics, population genetics and also developments in popular genealogy. Once again, biology is foregrounded in the discussion of human identity. Of particular importance is the preoccupation with origins and personal discovery and the increasing use of racial and ethnic categories in social policy. This new genetic knowledge, expressed in technology and practice, has the potential to disrupt how race and ethnicity are debated, managed and lived. As such, this volume investigates the ways in which existing social categories are both maintained and transformed at the intersection of the natural (sciences) and the cultural (politics). The contributors include medical researchers, anthropologists, historians of science and sociologists of race relations; together, they explore the new and challenging landscape where biology becomes the stuff of identity.

How does new information technology become part of the fabric of organisational life? Drawing on insights from social studies of technology, gender studies and the sociology of consumption, Valuing Technology opens up new directions in the analysis of sociotechnical change within organisations. Based on a major research project focused upon the introduction of management of information systems in health, higher education and retailing, I explores the active role of end-users in innovation.This book argues that it is through the , often difficult, engagement between users and technology that new computer systems come to gain value within organisations. Key themes developed through analysis of case studies include:*the valuing of technology via the on-going construction of needs, uses and utilities*occupational identities, organisational inequalities and technological change*the gendering of technological and organisational change*interpretive flexibility and the ''stabilisation'' of technological systems and their incorporation into the lives of people in organisations.A stimulating blend of the theoretical and substantive, this book demands a radical redefinition of ''technology acquisition''. It''s highly original approach makes Valuing Technology essential reading for students, lecturers and researchers within the fields of organisation studies and the sociology of technology.

How does new information technology become part of the fabric of organisational life? Drawing on insights from social studies of technology, gender studies and the sociology of consumption, Valuing Technology opens up new directions in the analysis of sociotechnical change within organisations. Based on a major research project focused upon the introduction of management of information systems in health, higher education and retailing, I explores the active role of end-users in innovation.This book argues that it is through the , often difficult, engagement between users and technology that new computer systems come to gain value within organisations. Key themes developed through analysis of case studies include:*the valuing of technology via the on-going construction of needs, uses and utilities*occupational identities, organisational inequalities and technological change*the gendering of technological and organisational change*interpretive flexibility and the ''stabilisation'' of technological systems and their incorporation into the lives of people in organisations.A stimulating blend of the theoretical and substantive, this book demands a radical redefinition of ''technology acquisition''. It''s highly original approach makes Valuing Technology essential reading for students, lecturers and researchers within the fields of organisation studies and the sociology of technology.