Play Book Tag discussion

I enjoyed this book even more than I had thought I would. It's a pretty seamless blend of fact and fiction, and a thought-provoking and feminist-viewpoint consideration of why some words or some definitions of words, might have been selected for the dictionary (accepted in polite society, used and understood by men, traditional, with formal references) and others might be left out, particularly in the late Victorian era (vulgar, words used by and familiar to women, showing language changing over time rather than being static, spoken rather than written). The backdrop of the women's suffragist movement, and then the First World War, as well as illustrations of class structures and gender-based hypocrisies, both large and small ensured the book wasn't too insular to the dictionary itself. But at the same time, it was the details about the compilation of the dictionary that I found most interesting. It's not faultless - Esme's trials and tribulations got a little repetitive sometimes - but it added a lot to what I already knew.

I listened to this on Audible - the reading was well done.

A good prompt to re-read The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness & the Love of Words (I watched the rather bad film of it last night and wished I hadn't bothered, but the book is wonderful!) and also to properly read one of Pip Williams' source books (and source authors - she spent a lot of time with him, according to the credits): Peter Gilliver's excellent The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary.