Boy I once was lives in me

 I've been following a Charles Dickens reading group mailing-list since the past few months.

Charles Dickens Discussion/mailing list:  Inimitable-Boz

Boz

There are some committed members who read the books and contributes to many wonderfully detailed discussions. Here is one that caught my attention. This came up in the A Christmas Carol discussion:

When I was a boy in the 1940s, New York City, my city, had the largest Jewish population in the world, about 2 million people out of the city's 8 million. And yet Jewish culture and history were almost never acknowledged in public discourse. Although 26 students in my class of 28 were Jewish, our teachers made us sing Christmas songs and make Christmas decorations. This badly insulted our identity, doubly so as nothing was ever said to us in school about the Holocaust, which had made all of us crazy with distress, which made us all ache with despair. The stores were always decked out for Christmas, as were the magazines, and the songs on the radio were all Christmas songs. Our culture, our identity was utterly invisible, it seemed. We weren't the only group that was ignored. Black people had it worse, as did gays and lesbians. And our situation was mitigated by how many Jewish entertainers there were on radio and early television, but those comedians and singers were almost never identified as Jewish, although we all knew that they were.

 

I bring this up to explain my identification with Scrooge. If Christian culture was going to deny our existence so thoroughly, we would harden ourselves against Christmas. If our teachers couldn't manage to wish us a Happy Hanukah, we'd view their holiday joy as humbug. Because anti-semitism intensified at Christmas and Easter, became more visible and vocal, we were always made uneasy at holiday time.

 

We live in a much healthier time, one in which many cultures are acknowledged, and as a result my children don't cringe, as I used to, when strangers and friends wish us Merry Christmas, thinking they're being neighborly. But the boy I once was lives on in me, and I still love it when Scrooge say, "Humbug!"  At that moment, he represents for me the refusal to submit to everyone else's assumptions.

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Inimitable-Boz/conversations/topics/34028

Kurt Vonnegut reviews Random House Dictionary (1968)

Many sections caught my attention in Kurt Vonnegut's 1968 review of Random House Dictionary of the English Language in New York Times.

On looking for secret and taboo words in dictionary as a child

If my emphasis on dirty words so early in this review seems childish, I can only replay that I, as a child, would never have started going through unabridged dictionaries if I hadn't suspected that there were dirty words hidden in there, where only grownups were supposed to find them. I always ended the searches feeling hot and stuffy inside, and looking at the queer illustrations--at the trammel wheel, the arbalest, and the dugong.

Ttrendsetters and use of  prescriptive and descriptive dictionary:

[Prof. Robert] Scholes replied judiciously that [Richard] Yates should get the second edition of the "Merriam- Webster," which was prescriptive rather than descriptive. Prescriptive, as nearly as I could tell, was like an honest cop, and descriptive was like a boozed-up war buddy from Mobile, Ala. Yates said he would get the tough one; but, my goodness, he doesn't need official instructions in English any more than he needs training wheels on his bicycle. As Scholes said later, Yates is the sort of man lexicographers read in order to discover what pretty new things the language is up to.

Right in the next paragraph, Vonnegut tells which words to look to know whether you dictionary takes a prescriptivist or descriptivist approach:

 To find out in a rush whether a dictionary is prescriptive or descriptive, you look up ain't and like. I learned this trick of horseback logomachy from reviews of the "Merriam-Webster" third edition. And here is the rundown on ain't: the "Merriam-Webster" first edition says that it is colloquial or illiterate, the second says it is dialect or illiterate, and the third says that ain't is, "though disapproved by many and more common in less educated speech, used orally. . .by many cultivated speakers esp. in the phrase ain't I." I submit that this nation is so uniformly populated by parvenus with the heebie-jeebies that the phrase ain't I is heard about as frequently as the mating cry of the heath hen.