Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (8th edition)

摘要

I have always had a nostalgic liking for the Penguin quotations dictionary: I bought a copy of its original edition when I was at school and derived much pleasure, entertainment and instruction from it, or as Winston Churchill put it as reproduced in this Oxford Dictionary: "It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations". But in recent times, I think the Oxford Dictionary has come to surpass its various rivals. One of its first merits is that of regular updating: first published in 1941, it was revised at various intervals up to the fifth edition of 1999 since when new editions have followed regularly at five-year intervals with the last in 2009 (RR 2010/154). The obvious advantage of this schedule is to enable the work to keep pretty well up to date with significant contemporary quotations. That, of course, is a matter of editorial judgement: Among all the sound bites bombarding us from political and other sources, who is to judge what is worth keeping? It is a tricky task: Would one have guessed in 1963 that a pert response to a judge in court by Mandy Rice-Davies ("He would, wouldn't he") would still be quite regularly quoted more than 50 years later? Some quotations owe as much to the identity of the person making them as to their intrinsic value: President Obama has seven entries, his wife one, and it is her quotation ("If you want to know the reason why I'm standing here, it's because of education. I never cut class") which I suspect will have a longer shelf life than her husband's rhetoric, once he has left office.