My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Not a terribly fast paced book, but very intriguing. In fact, it's fairly reminiscent of Professor and the Mad Man, which also discusses the inception of the Oxford dictionary. In this book, though, it shows how much vocabulary can be extremely classist. A young girl finds a scrap of paper which contained one of the discarded words. Who decides what word is included? She is determined to find out, and then to include some of the words as an adult. So she goes to the working class people and finds words that she had never heard of before. Words that make her blush. But it's still the vocabulary of the people. And then she also contemplates the fact that many words are slanted against women. It's been a while since I've read the book so I can't remember the examples, but it was pretty eye opening. Not a movie, yet, but I could see it happening.
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