Presents an outrageous imagining of what a dictionary might look like thirty years after the 2004 presidential election and contains examples of words from over two hundred writers, musicians, and artists along with a twenty-two-track CD.

Our revved-up world isn't just changing faster than ever before, it's creating new words and new language at breakneck speed. Now, Faith Popcorn, the futurist and trend authority who is know as the Nostradamus of marketing--and Adam Hanft, author, business strategist and media critic--have created the first-ever Dictionary of the Future, a thought-provoking, entertaining and richly informative collection of hundreds of new, emerging and just-invented words and terms. While traditional dictionaries wait for language to achieve familiarity, Dictionary of the Future is there first, enabling readers to identify the latest trends across all dimensions of the culture. Turn its pages and you see the future taking shape, word by word, idea by idea. Organized by familiar categories such as the arts, corporate America, education, health and technology--and by provocative rubrics such as "New Behaviors" and "New Structures"--Dictionary of the Future includes newly minted language such as: Yogurt Cities: places with "active cultures" where baby boomers will retire Chimeraplasty: molecular messengers that will repair damaged genes Free-Range Children: new generation of kids raised without over-programming Dictionary of the Future is an extraordinary advance look at tomorrow. More than fascinating reading, more than a treat for anyone who loves words, it's filled with valuable insights that can change the way you think about your business, your career, your health and, oh yes, the world.

This book was conceived by Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, Nicole Krauss, and the staff of McSweeney's as a way to bring over a hundred authors together to promote progressive causes in the November 2004 election. An imagining of what a dictionary might look like about thirty years hence, when the world's problems are solved and our current president is a distant memory, the book is by turns funny, outraged, utopian, and dyspeptic. 100 percent of the proceeds will go to a mix of political organizations to support progressive candidates in the upcoming elections. Over 150 writers contributed to the book, including: Stephen King, Robert Olen Butler, Glen David Gold, Richard Powers, Susan Straight, Sarah Vowell, Billy Collins, C.K. Williams, Colson Whitehead, Donald Antrim, Jonathan Franzen, Edwidge Danticat, Edward Hirsch, Joyce Carol Oates, Katha Pollitt, Padgett Powell, Paul Auster, Anthony Swofford, Julia Alvarez, Susan Choi, Jim Shepard, Aimee Bender, and Art Spiegelman. Released in partnership with Barsuk Records, the book will include a CD compilation, with exclusive songs by the best musicians working. Among them: David Byrne, R.E.M., Death Cab for Cutie, Sleater-Kinney, Flaming Lips, Tom Waits, Bright Eyes, They Might Be Giants, Nada Surf, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

The period from 1925 to 1960 was the heyday of the American Radio Soap Opera. In addition to being part of popular culture, the soap opera had important commercial aspects as well that were not only related to their production, but also to the desperate need to sell products or perish. Both sides of this story are traced in this comprehensive compendium. The dictionary section, made up of more than 500 cross-referenced entries, provides brief vignettes of the more popular and also less well-known 'soaps,' among them Back Stage Wife, Our Gal Sunday, Pepper Young's Family and The Guiding Light. Other entries evoke those who brought these programs to life: the actors, announcers, scriptwriters, networks, and even the sponsors. Nor are the basic themes, the stock characters and the gimmick, forgotten. The book's introduction defines the soap opera, examines the span of the radio serial, reviews its origins and its demise, and focuses on the character types that made up its denizens. The chronology outlines the period and the bibliography offers further reading. Together, these elements make a comprehensive reference work that researchers will find invaluable long into the future.

Produced by Oxford's American Dictionaries Program, and drawing on the expertise of scores of American scholars and advisors, The New Oxford American Dictionary sets the standard of excellence for lexicography in this country.Here is the most accurate and richly descriptive picture of American English ever offered in any dictionary. Oxford's American editors drew on our 200-million-word databank of contemporary North American English, plus the unrivaled citation files of the world-renowned Oxford English Dictionary. We started with American evidence--an unparalleled resource unique to Oxford. Our staff logged more than 50 editor-years, checking every entry and every definition. Oxford's ongoing North American Reading Program, begun in the early 1980s, keeps our lexicographers in touch with fresh evidence of our language and usage--in novels and newspapers, in public records and magazines, and on-line, too.To provide unprecedented clarity, the entries are organized around core meanings, reflecting the way people think about words and eliminating the clutter and confusion of a traditional dictionary entry. Each entry plainly shows the major meaning or meanings of the word, plus any related senses, arranged in intuitive constellations of connected meanings. Definitions are supplemented by illustrative, in-context examples of actual usage.This major new edition of The New Oxford American Dictionary includes a guide to the pronunciations on every page, a new etymology essay by Anatoly Liberman, completely updated and revised maps, and more than a thousand new entries, covering everything new in our language from low-carb to warblog and beyond.The New Oxford American Dictionary is designed to serve the user clearly, simply, and quickly, with the precise guidance you expect from Oxford University Press. With in-depth and up-to-date coverage that all users need and expect--for reading and study, for technical terms, for language guidance--it continues the tradition of scholarship and lexicographic excellence that are the hallmarks of every Oxford dictionary.Web SiteA companion web site is now available at www.oup.com/us/noad.

“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.