The Book That Keeps On Growing
It is one of the most famous books in the world; yet it has no story and no interesting characters, no exciting beginning and no satisfying ending. And yet this book keeps being printed and it keeps growing. This book is the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the most famous dictionaries in the English-speaking world.
The Oxford English Dictionary or OED for short, began in 1857 as just an idea of a group of people who thought the world needed an English-language dictionary to show the history of English words from 1150 CE to the present. It wasn’t until the late 1870s, however, when James Murray joined the project that it began to grow. Murray planned for a dictionary of about 6,400 pages in four volumes (册), completed in 10 years.
Murray and his assistants worked in a small metal building. They collected millions of pieces of paper, each one with a word and an example sentence or phrase written on it. Murray and his assistants worked hard, but after five years they had only reached the word ant!
It was not until 1928 that the dictionary was completed and published: 10 volumes with over 400, 000 words and phrases. James Murray did not live to see the completion of his life’s work, he passed away in 1915, over a decade before OED came out.
As soon as the dictionary was published, however, the editors started to update it! In 1933, the Oxford English dictionary was reprinted in 12 volumes. Between 1972 and 1986, four more volumes were added with new technical and scientific vocabulary and words from other English-speaking countries, such as Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. In 1989, the entire dictionary was reprinted in 20 volumes! Three years later, all 20 volumes were put onto CD-ROM, and the entire dictionary is available online today.
With about 600,000 words and three million quotations (引语) from over 1,000 years of English, the OED not only is a record of where the English language has come from but has also become an important part of the history of English-speaking cultures around the world.
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Getting rid of dirt, in the opinion of most people, is a good thing. However, the attitudes to dirt are always changing.
In the early 16th century, people thought that dirt on the skin was a means to block out disease, and washing off dirt with hot water could open up the skin and let ills in. A particular danger was thought to lie in public baths. By 1538, the French king had closed the bath houses in his kingdom. The king of England did something similar in 1546. Thus began a long time when the rich and the poor in Europe lived with dirt in a friendly way. France’s Henry IV was famously dirty. Upon learning that a nobleman had taken a bath, the king ordered that, to avoid the attack of disease, the nobleman should not go out.
Though the belief above was long-lived, dirt has no longer been regarded as a nice neighbour ever since the 18th century. Scientifically speaking, cleaning away dirt is good to health. Clean water supply and hand washing are practical means of preventing disease. Yet, it seems that standards of cleanliness have moved beyond science since World War II. Advertisements repeatedly sell the idea; clothes need to be whiter than white, cloths ever softer, surfaces to shine. Has the hate for dirt, however, gone too far?
Attitudes to dirt still differ hugely nowadays. Many first-time parents nervously try to warn their children off touching dirt, which might be responsible for the spread of disease. On the contrary, Mary Ruebush, an American immunologist(免疫学家) , encourages children to play in the dirt to build up a strong immune system. And the latter position is gaining some ground.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________| 出生年月 | 1938年7月 |
| 主要贡献 | 1. 建立“数字敦煌”； 2. 编写了许多与敦煌莫高窟相关的书籍。 |
| 评价 | 2019年9月，被授予“文物保护杰出贡献者”国家荣誉称号。 |
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Before the 1830s, most newspapers were sold through yearly subscriptions(订阅) in America, usually $ 8 to $ 10 a year. Today $ 8 or $ 10 seems a small amount of money, but at that time the amounts were unaffordable to most citizens. Accordingly, newspapers were read almost only by rich people in politics or the trades. In addition, most newspapers had little in them that would appeal to a large audience. They were dull and visually unpleasant. But the revolution that was taking place in the 1830s would change all that.
The trend, then, was toward the “penny paper”---a term referring to papers made widely available to the public. It meant any inexpensive newspaper; perhaps more importantly it meant newspapers that could be bought in single copies on the street.
This development did not take place overnight. It had been possible（but not easy） to buy single copies of newspapers before 1830, but this usually meant the reader had to go down to the printer’s office to buy a copy. Street sales were almost unknown. However, within a few years street sales of newspapers would be commonplace in eastern cities. At first the price of single copy was seldom a penny ---usually two or three cents was charged --- and some of the older well-known papers charged five or six cents. But the phrase “penny paper” caught the public’s fancy soon there would be papers that did indeed sell for only a penny.
This new trend of newspapers for “the man on the street” did not begin well. Some of the early ventures（企业）were immediate failures. Publishers already in business, people who were owners of successful papers, had little desire to change the tradition. It took a few youthful and daring businessmen to get the ball rolling.
