The book follows the story of an erudite prisoner who, after committing a spot of murder, begins work submitting sample quotations and word origins to The book follows the story of an erudite prisoner who, after committing a spot of murder, begins work submitting sample quotations and word origins to the OED working group. Simon Winchester previously touched on what would become the topic of this book in The Meaning of Everything but here the story is brought into full light. I'd say about 10-15% of the other material on the making of the OED are also mentioned in this book just as a heads up. Winchester is let nugget driven than say Bill Bryson but the story is compelling, consisting of a strange sort of redemption and serving as an inadvertant meditation on the desire of some imprisoned to be useful. The reveal that the correspondent has committed a capital crime is outlined as a riveting play-by-play and I'm unsure of how much of the detail is created by the author vs being lifted from correspondence or journal somewhere.
I feel the book is only good if you've read something else around it as on its own the story about the correspondence and scholarship is a bit thin. Placed in the context of the OED writ large, it becomes a jewel....more
This is a funny and lovely wordbucket by Bill Bryson. He's annoyingly good at coming up with pithy nuggets and stringing them together to create a bo This is a funny and lovely wordbucket by Bill Bryson. He's annoyingly good at coming up with pithy nuggets and stringing them together to create a book that seemingly consists entirely of candy. He himself is not a linguistics expert but he weaves together information with such deftness but you can help but feel these are things Bryson simply knows or, to over-extend his competences, has decreed.
But, at the end of the day this is a Bill Bryson book so like gorging on candy one feels a bit less sated than one wishes when done. Regardless, enjoyable....more
This short book takes a look at the forces that cause English to change and how their are in many cases both not malicious and often useful. The authoThis short book takes a look at the forces that cause English to change and how their are in many cases both not malicious and often useful. The author discusses the process of coining neologisms as well as how words meanings can seem to completely invert. This is done without a finger wag but as a documentarian, explaining the process and showing why no one should fear changes to our tongue.
Again, I'm a big fan of McWhorter and six hours or so with him is well worth my Audible credit. Also, anything that shifts me away from being a prescriptivist towards a descriptivist I consider to be self improvement....more
This book is a delightful take-down of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis that the language we use shapes how we experience the world around us. The author isThis book is a delightful take-down of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis that the language we use shapes how we experience the world around us. The author is a pleasure to follow and uses the appropriate amount of rigorous proof, persuasive reasoning, and sometimes cajoling to point out that if there is an effect, it's a small one.
Along the way, the author shows his depth of understanding a research and picks apart tests that attempt to (to his mind) overstate the power of language. In the process, the author shows how vastly more interesting and multifaceted language is compared to simplifications designed to test an overly simple point.
John McWhorter is one of my favorite authors and again here he enchants....more
Oh, Stephen Pinker. He's like a factory that produces interesting books on topics that I find curious. In "Words and Rules" Pinker breaks down speech Oh, Stephen Pinker. He's like a factory that produces interesting books on topics that I find curious. In "Words and Rules" Pinker breaks down speech and language processing to almost atomic pieces and explains how each part seems to be processed by the mind as it pertains to the rules of speech. The byproduct of the book is that I'm now more than ever a descriptivist and that I have far too much fun mispluralizing words.
I consumed the audio version and have gone back to get the dead tree version to take advantage of the number of explanatory graphs, trees, and tables.
Every rule we subject our nouns and verbs to receives a thorough scrutiny that alert us to the real rules we use in speech.
Etymologicon is a book-length ramble with some tenuous connections in it. While the origins are interesting, the derivations are rapid-fire and hap-haEtymologicon is a book-length ramble with some tenuous connections in it. While the origins are interesting, the derivations are rapid-fire and hap-hazard. There's almost no easy narrative thread to it and going back to something you can't quite remember is near impossible. It feels like a long word origin beat poem more than anything. I enjoyed it, but as much as I enjoy lists of word origin, there are very few that I can actually remember from this book in hindsight....more
Loading...
