Word: prosodia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Barbarous Language. Sam Johnson was not the only man to realize the need for such a book. While learned academies in France and Italy had both compiled dictionaries for their own countries, Britons, said Dryden in 1693, "have yet no English prosodia, not so much as a tolerable dictionary, or a grammar; so that our language is in a manner barbarous." The best reference book around was Nathan Bailey's Universal Etymological English Dictionary, but the Bailey brand of definition, e.g., a mouse: "an animal well known," was hardly adequate. Finally, a group of booksellers got in touch with...
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