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From Washington, D.C., this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.

I'm Bob Garfield with Mike Volo, and today, episode number five titled Untuning the String,

wherein we discuss the total shitstorm sparked by the publication of a dictionary.

Okay. sparked by the publication of a dictionary. Mike, today we're going to do something a little different because, you know, we have

literally weeks of history on this show. But instead of telling a meandering, although

clearly fascinating tale, incrementally and in excruciating to tale, we're going to let somebody else do it.

Yeah, we are. We're going to talk today to David Skinner. He's the editor of Humanities magazine, which is published by the National Endowment for the Humanities. And he's the author of a book that's coming out in the fall.

It's called The Story of Ain't, America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary

Ever Published.

The book is about a chapter in this sort of cultural history of America that's

almost hard to believe.

It's about a kind of panic in 1961.

Yeah, well, understandably, because, I mean, this was the time of the space race,

the Cuban missile crisis, the sexual revolution.

America was being turned upside down.

So what's this one about?

Is it about the pill?

Well, it's about a dictionary. It's about a dictionary that was officially titled Webster's

...