Henning Garvin is mindful that a day will come when he can no longer turn to his aging dad, a fluent speaker of the Ho-Chunk language — spelled Hoocąk — and ask how to say this or that in their ...

Since the 1960s, the reference book has cataloged how people actually use language, not how they should. That might be changing. An Object Lesson. That symbolic importance is summed up in the phrase ...