Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations - Hardcover

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9780199208951: Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199208956 ISBN 13: 9780199208951

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2007

This exciting new edition offers both a vivid picture both of the world today, and an enduring record of the landmark events and key voices leading to it, captured in thousands of memorable quotations. From Scott's Antarctic Expedition in 1912 to the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, charting watersheds such as the two World Wars as well as the ebbs and flows of popular culture, the quotations gathered here evoke a fascinating picture of the social, political, cultural, and scientific highlights of modern times.
Containing more than 5,000 quotations from authors as diverse as Bertolt Brecht, George W. Bush, Homer Simpson, Carl Sagan, William Shatner, and Desmond Tutu, the dictionary is organized alphabetically by author, with generous cross-referencing and keyword and thematic indexes. This new edition features more than 500 new quotations and 187 new authors. Gathered here are literary figures such as Italo Calvino, J. M. Coetzee, and Toni Morrison; politicians ranging from Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to Rudy Giuliani and Bill Clinton; entertainers such as Halle Berry and Jerry Seinfeld; and star athletes such as David Beckham and Serena Williams. The book includes special sections featuring quotations from cartoons, films, political slogans, famous last words, misquotations, official advice, newspaper headlines and more. Finally, this edition boasts a new and unique selection process, using the largest ongoing language research program in the world, Oxford English Corpus, to ensure that all the most popular and widely-used quotations are here.
Informative and entertaining, stretching from the deeply serious to the frivolous and surreal, The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations, Third Edition, will be a vital part of anyone's reference shelf, perfectly designed to answer the questions, "Who said what...and when...and why?"

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About the Author:

Elizabeth Knowles is the Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. She is Publishing Manager for Oxford Quotations Dictionaries and is a historical lexicographer, having previously worked on the 4th edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

From Booklist:

New editions of reliable reference books inevitably invite comparisons with earlier versions, and that is certainly the case here. Although both titles have kept their original format, they have also added new material, deleted less popular passages, and expanded their indexing. In the second edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations, modern now refers to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and "authors who were alive in or after 1914," while the first edition concentrates on the twentieth century and quotations from those "still alive after 1900." While retaining most of the quotations found in the earlier edition, this one adds a number of new selections, such as quotations referring to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Once again, the quotations are listed chronologically under each of the alphabetically arranged authors' names. Several special features are included: 14 "special categories," including "Advertising Slogans" (found under "Anonymous" in the first edition), "Misquotations," "Opening Lines" and "Taglines for Films," which present these quotations alphabetically by the first word of each passage; an expanded keyword index; and a "Selective Thematic Index," which points the way to quotations on such motifs as "America," "Britain," "Computing," and "Royalty."

The second edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase, Saying, and Quotation has been similarly updated. Themes such as "Computers and the Internet," "Management," and "Photography" have been added to the list of topics that opens the book. As in the earlier edition, the material is arranged by subject and then further categorized as "Proverbs and Sayings," "Phrases," and "Quotations." Although this edition retains the format of its predecessor, there has been an effort to strengthen "the links between individual remarks and fixed phrases and sayings," which are the hallmark of this particular work. Modern sayings related to the topic at hand as well as earlier (sometimes the earliest) forms of an adage have been added to many sections. The keyword index has been expanded and now forms almost one-fourth of the entire book.

Although there is some overlap between editions and even between these two titles, large or comprehensive collections will want to add both new editions as well as keep the earlier ones. A collection can never have too many quotation sources. RBB
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