A.Word.A.Day Guest Wordsmith Fred Shapiro is a librarian and lecturer at the Yale Law School. He writes:
“My recently published book, The Yale Book of Quotations (Yale University Press), is intended to supplant Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as the most authoritative quotation dictionary. It is the first major quotation book to emphasize modern sources, including popular culture, children’s literature, sports, computers, politics, and law.
The Yale Book of Quotations is also the first quotation book of any sort to use state-of-the-art research methods to comprehensively collect famous quotations and to trace quotations to their accurate origins. The Yale Book of Quotations includes hundreds of very famous and popular quotations omitted from other quotation dictionaries, and corrects the standard accounts of how many important quotations originated.”
anecdotage (an-ik-DO-tij) noun
1. The telling of anecdotes.
2. Anecdotes collectively.
[From Greek anekdota (things unpublished), from an- (not) + ekdidonai (to publish). Originally applied by the Greek historian Procopius to his unpublished memoirs of the Emperor Justinian and his consort Theodora.]
(ed-beware this one)
3. Old age characterized by excessive telling of anecdotes.
[Humorous blend of anecdote and dotage, from dote (to be foolish).]
“When a man fell into his anecdotage it was a sign for him to retire.”
Benjamin Disraeli; Lothair; 1870; quoted in The Yale Book of Quotations.
Link to book– Epstein/dp/0300107986
Link to book: http://www.amazon.com/Yale-Book-Quotations-Joseph
She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965)
Re:Link to book
worldcat entry and the publishers website (Yale U. Press) and where to buy from an independent retailer…why do we always have to automatically send the bucks to amazon.com????
Re:Link to book
The book is $50 at the publishers website and $30 at Amazon. That $20 is real money to me. If I was Bill Gates I would buy from the Yale Website but I am not. My wife weeds the garden of my daughter’s ballet teacher so we can afford lessons. Ballet lessons are hardly a necessity but we sacrifice for our kids. If we couldn’t buy food the lessons would go. I have a Honda Civic with 1,000 hit and run damage that I can not afford to fix. I have medical bills that need to be paid. So in reality I am not going to drop any money on a quotation book but if I did I would buy it from the source that cost the least. If is was $49 at Amazon and $50 at the publisher I might go independent and donate a dollar. But $20 I have things to do with it.
In regards to BookSense it makes no sense to me. It is not an online link to where you can buy the book. All it does is tell you where you can drive to to plunk down full retail for the book.
Re:Link to book
Yale Press sells books to Amazon and Amazon resells them. If they are willing to sell them to Amazon for that price why shouldn’t I buy from Amazon?
Maybe this book has the answer in it.
Re:Link to book
excessive telling of hard-luck story
Re:Link to book
In regards to excessive whining about independent booksellers.