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Ronald Macaulay, an emeritus professor of linguistics at Pitzer College, is the author of last year's "Seven Ways of Looking at Language." When he heard that the Claremont Colleges Library was removing 30,000 books from its shelves, he scanned the online list. He checked for his own books, of course: "Was it possible that the librarians would think that nobody would be interested in social-class speech differences in the Scottish towns of Glasgow and Ayr?" Many of the volumes picked for removal are clearly outdated, he acknowledges, but through the exercise he may have discovered some new books to read. Sample from the Chronicle of Higher Education:
There ought to be a prohibition on titles with the word "new" in them, since they are prime candidates for later elimination. Titles with the word "modern" are similarly vulnerable. I shed no tears for their expulsion...The list contained quite a few books on transformational grammar. It is not surprising that they should go, since even the originator of the term, Noam Chomsky, has stopped using it...
It is probably inevitable, if rather sad, that the list included a number of venerable works on Old English, usually known by the older term "Anglo-Saxon." I cannot imagine that there is even one of the approximately 5,000 undergraduates at the Claremont Colleges who would notice their disappearance, though at one time an exposure to Anglo-Saxon was required for those studying English literature.
One title he found intriguing: "Fourteen: Autobiography of an Age-Group," published in 1965. He muses: "What would be the differences from the same age group today?"