The Wider Context
The Language Report was one of the more successful attempts to disseminate trends in English in a scholarly, but accessible and readable form. An earlier publication, though more traditional in format, had been the Oxford Dictionary of New Words, compiled in Sara Tulloch in 1992, while Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue: The English Language (1990) and Made in America (1994) provided, from the viewpoint of an anglophile Mid-Westerner, entertaining accounts of the development of English on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. In 2006 the BBC television series Balderdash and Piffle, presented by Victoria Coren, highlighted how words found their way into the Oxford English Dictionary and the type of evidence that supported such entries. Referring to this process and to its illustration by Balderdash and Piffle, Dent noted that, since 2000, quarterly updates of Oxford's "revision work" had appeared on-line.
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