Snow Day Movie

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   dougwest1posted 3 years ago

   It was a cold and snowy day here, so I watched a movie on Netfilx about a group of writers, "The Professor and the Madman."  I am obviously biased because I am a writer, but I thought this show was great. If you have seen the show, what do you think?

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      Kathryn L Hillposted 3 years agoin reply to this

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Profe … he_Madman_(film)
      
      Yes, it is good, as it is based on an incredible true story.

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2. 78

   Kathryn L Hillposted 3 years ago

   "The Professor and the Madman is about the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary in the United States and Canada. It tells the story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary and one of its most prolific early contributors, William Chester Minor, a retired United States Army surgeon. Minor was, at the time, imprisoned in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, near the village of Crowthorne, in Berkshire, England.
   
   The professor is Sir James Murray, the chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Murray was a talented linguist ... had taught in schools and worked in banking. Faced with the enormous task of producing a comprehensive dictionary, with a quotation illustrating the uses of each meaning of each word, and with evidence for the earliest use of each, Murray enlisted the help of dozens of amateur philologists as volunteer researchers."
   Extracted from the above link.

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3. 78

   Kathryn L Hillposted 3 years ago

   "The dictionary began as a Philological Society project of a small group of intellectuals in London (and unconnected to Oxford University): Richard Chenevix Trench, Herbert Coleridge, and Frederick Furnivall, who were dissatisfied with the existing English dictionaries.
   
   in June 1857, they began by forming an "Unregistered Words Committee" to search for words that were unlisted or poorly defined in current dictionaries.
   
   In November, Trench's report was the study On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries, which identified seven distinct shortcomings in contemporary dictionaries:
   
   Incomplete coverage of obsolete words
   Inconsistent coverage of families of related words
   Incorrect dates for earliest use of words
   History of obsolete senses of words often omitted
   Inadequate distinction among synonyms
   Insufficient use of good illustrative quotations
   Space wasted on inappropriate or redundant content.
   
   The society ultimately realized that the number of unlisted words would be far more than the number of words in the English dictionaries of the 19th century, and shifted their idea from covering only words that were not already in English dictionaries to a larger project.
   On 7 January 1858, the society formally adopted the idea of a comprehensive new dictionary. Volunteer readers would be assigned particular books, copying passages illustrating word usage onto quotation slips.
   
   Later the same year, the society agreed to the project in principle, with the title A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles." Extracted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary

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4. 78

   Kathryn L Hillposted 3 years ago

   Furnivall approached James Murray, who accepted the post of editor. In the late 1870s, Furnivall and Murray met with several publishers about publishing the dictionary.
   In 1878, Oxford University Press agreed with Murray to proceed with the massive project; the agreement was formalized the following year. 20 years after its conception, the dictionary project finally had a publisher. It would take another 50 years to complete.
   
   "Late in his editorship, Murray learned that a prolific reader named W. C. Minor was a criminal lunatic. Minor was a Yale University-trained surgeon and military officer in the American Civil War, and was confined to Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane after killing a man in London. Minor invented his own quotation-tracking system, allowing him to submit slips on specific words in response to editors' requests. The story of Murray and Minor later served as the central focus of The Professor and the Madman, a popular book about the creation of the OED. This book was then the basis for the 2019 film The Professor and the Madman, starring Mel Gibson and Sean Penn."

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      dougwest1posted 3 years agoin reply to this

      Thanks for all the good historical information on the film. I didn't realize that Sean Penn was such a good actor.

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