Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Oxford University
Title : The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
Year : 20**

Link download : Oxford_University_-_The_Oxford_Dictionary_of_Quotations.zip

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. Many a home and library in the English-speaking world has a copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations in the first or, more frequently, second edition. Th ose should not be dispensed with nor superseded; but need will be found to make room for this new, third edition. For over a quarter of a century has passed since the publication of the last revision, and much that is quoted or quotable has been said or written or simply come into wider cognizance during this period. Add that the second edition, published in 1953, was about 95% the same in content as the first edition of 1941 -the differences consisting then chiefly of the addition of Second World W ar quotations ( essentially of course tho se of Winston Churchill), 1 correction of errors, rearrangement of certain sections, and much more full and precise indexing - and it will be seen that this volume presents the first substantial revision of the Dictionary since its original compilation. To have simply incorporated modern and freshly recognized quotations into the preceding edition in like measure to its ingredients would have resulted in a volume which, on account of the present costs of producing so bulky a work, must have been priced beyond the book-purchasing powers of ali but the wealthier owners of libraries, private or even public. To have published a separate supplement to the second edition would have been unfair to those (mostly younger) readers and writers who did not already possess a copy of a previous edition, and might reasonably seek a single-volume coverage of what they heard or saw quoted from ali periods and places that impinged on their own conversation or culture. It was resolved therefore that space must be made for new inclusions by considerable cutting of the contents of the second edition. Besides, there were positive reasons for omitting parts of the earlier selection of quotations in fairly extensive quantity. The first edition was compiled within the Oxford University Press in the decade of the 1930s by men and women imbued with the history and poli tics, the culture whether educated or popular, of the first quarter of the twentieth cent ury in Britain, and especially· the literature of the ancient and the English-speaking worlds that was then read and studied at home, school, and university. They had mostly been to Oxford or Cambridge and before that to schools where learning poetry (and even prose) by heart for repetition was regular. Sorne had served in the First World War and the songs they knew were those of marching soldiers or of the music-hall; drawing-room ballads too were not forgotten. Hymns, though, when church-going was still the rule, were probably the most widely known forms of song for the compilers of the first edition; and constant acquaintance with 1 The first edition contained only the one 'terminological inexactitude' part-sentence; the second edition added another 25 quotations from the then Prime Minister; in this new edition appear 41 Churchill items, including enough context for the original one to explain its sense and correct those who often misuse 'terminological inexactitude'. ...