How a special dictionary kept soldiers connected during WWII, with Peter Sokolowski

Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

Mignon Fogarty, Inc.

Society & Culture, Education

4.5 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2024

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

988. Peter Sokolowski, an editor at Merriam-Webster, goes through the fascinating history of the Armed Services Editions, a series of books published during World War II for distribution among the troops. We look at the special problems of wartime publishing, the collaborative efforts among publishers, and the lasting influence of these books on the publishing landscape.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Grandma Girl here, I'm in Yon Fog Fog, and today you're going to hear about an amazing
0:10.2	wartime effort to get books to soldiers on the front during World War II.
0:15.0	Millions of pocketbooks were delivered giving troops a little bit of home
0:19.0	and a taste for paperbacks that helped change the publishing industry.
0:23.8	And because one of those books was a dictionary, I'm here with Peter Sokolowski, editor at large
0:29.4	at Merriam-Webster, a judge in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and a State Department specialist who
0:35.2	travels the world promoting the English language.
0:38.6	Peter, welcome. It's great to see you and I feel like we're old friends by now. It's been a long time back and forth and it's the best of social media is Grammar Girl to me because I came to social media and I just thought,
0:56.0	I have a couple interests and I found my world. You know, I found people who have similar interests and who do similar kinds of work and those kinds of
1:05.6	connections have been really precious.
1:07.6	So thank you for that.
1:08.8	Yeah, I know I appreciate you know you've given me a tour of the East Coast. We went to a
1:13.0	Scrabble competition together you brought me some of the best chocolate I've ever
1:16.1	had in my life so it's good to see you here and today we're going to talk about
1:21.5	because Memorial Day is coming up in the United States.
1:25.3	I discovered that Merriam-Webster had published an Armed Services Dictionary and it's this
1:31.1	cute little thing with this wonderful story and I just want you to tell us all about it.
1:36.2	Well, you know, it's a it's a great story and I'm glad you asked because it's one of those kind of wartime stories where everybody got together, you know, where the country kind of worked together.
1:46.2	One of the examples that we can talk about is during the war, you know, Chrysler and Ford competitors.
1:51.9	They were all making jeeps and tanks you know they all went
1:54.9	together for the war effort that was also true in publishing in book publishing and
1:59.6	turns out it came from within the army itself. There was an office of the library at the army and an
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