Paul Dickson

From BR Bullpen

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Paul Dickson, born in Yonkers, NY on July 30, 1939, is a linguist who is the author of several baseball books, including Baseball's Greatest Quotations (1991) and The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, first published in 1989 and updated regularly since. The dictionary traces the meaning and history of hundreds of baseball terms from the most common to the very obscure, dispelling a number of long-lived myths in the process. Its thoroughness in documenting a whole segment of the modern American lexicon has been recognized by linguists well beyond the baseball community.

Other books include The Unwritten Rules of Baseball (2009), The Hidden Language of Baseball (2003), The Joy of Keeping Score (1996), Baseball, the President's Game (with William B. Mead, 1993), Bill Veeck: Baseball's Greatest Maverick (2012) and Leo Durocher: Baseball's Prodigal Son (2017). He has also written books on general history topics, such as the birth of electronic warfare and the 1932 march of the "Bonus Army" on Washington, DC, the story of the launch of the Soviet "Sputnik" satellite, and a history of policy think tanks.

Dickson graduated from Wesleyan University in 1961 and then served in the US Navy, before working as a reporter and as an editor for McGraw-Hill Publications. He was honored with SABR's Henry Chadwick Award in 2013 and received the "Tony Salin Memorial Award" from the Baseball Reliquary in 2011.

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