Search results for ""author david skinner""

Created by the most respected American publisher of dictionaries and supervised by the editor Philip Gove, Webster's Third broke with tradition, adding thousands of new words and eliminating artificial notions of correctness, basing proper usage on how language was actually spoken. The dictionary's revolutionary style sparked what David Foster Wallace called the Fort Sumter of the Usage Wars. Editors and scholars howled for Gove's blood, calling him an enemy of clear thinking, a great relativist who was trying to sweep the English language into chaos. Critics bayed at the dictionary's permissive handling of ain't. Literary intellectuals such as Dwight Macdonald believed the dictionary's scientific approach to language and its abandonment of the old standard of usage represented nothing less than the unraveling of civilization. Entertaining and erudite, and a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, The Story of Ain't describes a great societal metamorphosis, tracing the fallout of the world wars, the rise of an educated middle class, and the emergence of America as the undisputed leader of the free world, and illuminating how those forces shaped our language. Never before or since has a dictionary so embodied the cultural transformation of the United States.

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Essays on important topics in early music. Christopher Page is one of the most influential and distinguished scholars and performers of medieval music. His first book, Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages (1987), marked the beginning of what might be called the"Page turn" in the study and performance of medieval music. His many subsequent publications, radio broadcasting (notably the series Spirit of the Age) and performances and recordings with his ensemble Gothic Voices changed the perception of and thinking about music from before about 1400 and forged new ways of communicating its essence to scholars as well as its subtle beauty to wider audiences. The essays presented here in his honour reflectthe broad range of subject-matter, from the earliest polyphony to the conductus and motet of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the troubadour and trouvère repertories, song and dance, church music, medieval music theory, improvisation techniques, historiography of medieval music, musical iconography, instrumental music, performance practice and performing, that has characterised Page's major contribution to our knowledge of music of the Middle Ages.

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How does new information technology become part of the fabric of organisational life? Drawing on insights from social studies of technology, gender studies and the sociology of consumption, Valuing Technology opens up new directions in the analysis of sociotechnical change within organisations. Based on a major research project focused upon the introduction of management of information systems in health, higher education and retailing, I explores the active role of end-users in innovation.This book argues that it is through the , often difficult, engagement between users and technology that new computer systems come to gain value within organisations. Key themes developed through analysis of case studies include:*the valuing of technology via the on-going construction of needs, uses and utilities*occupational identities, organisational inequalities and technological change*the gendering of technological and organisational change*interpretive flexibility and the 'stabilisation' of technological systems and their incorporation into the lives of people in organisations.A stimulating blend of the theoretical and substantive, this book demands a radical redefinition of 'technology acquisition'. It's highly original approach makes Valuing Technology essential reading for students, lecturers and researchers within the fields of organisation studies and the sociology of technology.

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