Review by New York Times Review
IMAGINE THE PROGRESS of the English language as a moving train. It need not be a fast-moving train; in fact, it helps if you picture it chugging along majestically through a flat landscape. Our two authors are actively interested in observing the progress of the train. One has spent his entire career practicing lexicography at the Oxford English Dictionary; in relation to the train, he tirelessly jogs along just behind and every so often plants a flag on the track to mark the precise place where the train formerly was. The other author is a well-known professor of linguistics who skips along beside the train, waving cheerfully and occasionally performing somersaults to express just how happy he is to be keeping up. The train, of course, takes no notice of either - just as it has taken no notice of all the righteous idiots who have, periodically, stood in front of it, commanding it to stop. As we bring our locomotive analogy to a merciful close, it is worth glancing back down the line to see all the broken bodies of those many pitiful idiots, stretching way back to the horizon. The making of the Oxford English Dictionary, from its origins in 1857, is not a new story for many of us. Simon Winchester's "The Meaning of Everything" gave us a vivid account of the tortured and lengthy history of the mighty first edition (completed in 1928), overseen up to the letter T by the superlatively bearded Scottish brainbox James Murray. Winchester then brought us up to date by way of the four-volume Supplement (finished in 1986) and the computer-assisted 20-volume second edition (1989) and right into the online era. The interesting question of the profitability of the dictionary was not Winchester's concern. No, it was the sheer lexicographic brainpower that was celebrated in "The Meaning of Everything." One of Murray's first-edition associates was quoted as saying that one's first 12 languages were "always" the hardest. John Simpson joined the dictionary in the mid-1970s, in the era of the Supplement, which was overseen by the New Zealander Robert Burchfield. Simpson worked his way up, and by the time he retired in 2013 he was chief editor. Like Winchester, he omits mention of whether the dictionary makes money (perhaps it doesn't), but otherwise "The Word Detective" is a charmingly full, frank and humorous account of a career dedicated to rigorous lexicographic rectitude. What changes Simpson has seen! When he began at the O.E.D., there was an afternoon ritual called "dictionary tea" when the godlike chief editor (Burchfield) would mix with his mortal underlings and lead them in a sort of awkward philological seminar. Burchfield comes out of this book quite badly, I must say. He is referred to, unaffectionately, as "our chief editor," and there is a long-ago incident with a chocolate orange that evidently rankles Simpson to this very day. (CHOCOLATE ORANGE: an inexpensive British confectionary item externally shaped and internally segmented to resemble a well-known citrus fruit with a tough, bright reddish-yellow rind.) "But tell us about the lexicography," you cry. Well, I doubt there has ever been a better account of how a person with a capacious brain sits down with a cup of tea and a pile of cards and sets about creating authoritative definitions. Throughout the text, Simpson inserts potted word biographies (apprenticeship, deadline, inkling) that illustrate both the complexity and the "excitement" of the work. It is astonishing that anyone could have done this taxing job, without a break, for over 35 years, especially while being engaged in heaving and shoving the whole intractable project from its original state as a set of heavy (and instantly outdated) books toward being a lively interactive online tool. He is an absolute hero. Where Simpson's lexicographic practice has most notably differed from that of his illustrious predecessors is in the scope of sources used for word citations. In this matter above all he is justly proud. Basically, where Burchfield favored citations from literary authors (who are slow to use new expressions), Simpson got words from motorcycle magazines. John McWhorter's "Words on the Move" is far more polemical in style; in fact it's a sort of master class in how to prove a point. McWhorter first staggers you with a glittering analogy, and then, once you are off-guard, he bombards you with so many (brilliant) examples that resistance is both useless and out of the question. I have to say, I loved "Words on the Move," but it's possible I am suffering from Stockholm syndrome. I keep saying to people who aren't particularly interested, "Let me list the five ways that new words are - and always have been - created out of old ones. First we must consider modal pragmatic markers." AFTERWARD, it can be hard to remember precisely where all McWhorter's killer examples fitted into the argument. How did he defend "the ask" (as in, "What's the ask?")? Oh, yes, he explained that words such as "walk" and "scratch" were verbs that became nouns in just the same way. How did he justify "irregardless"? By making us understand that it is human nature to worry whether words are strong enough to do the job at hand, so we unconsciously give them a bit of help. For example, I know someone who always says she will "double-check" something, when all that she means is "check." McWhorter tells us that "whelm" used to mean what "overwhelm" means now. Generally (he says), words change not because we're too ignorant to use them correctly, but because we are so anxious to communicate efficiently, which is encouraging to know. I personally appreciated the book's comprehensive and entertaining section on "backshift," when the emphasis on a word travels from, say, "hot-DOG" to "HOT-dog." In Britain, the history of backshift is a bit more complicated - but it enrages me when people in British historical dramas say "CIG-arette" when at the time they would have said "cigar-ETTE." I mentioned McWhorter analogies. It's why I had the nerve to do the train thing. He is irrepressible. He invokes clouds, parades, moviemaking, medieval painting; he says, "changes in meaning are as natural to words as changes of pitch are to music"; and a new perspective is "something that needs to be pointed out, like showing someone that deer just over the hill fixing to bolt away." I liked best the idea of the English language as a long-running stage show that needs to be kept fresh. If all else fails, however, McWhorter just draws on his apparently effortless working knowledge of every bloody language on the planet ("I think of Mualang, a language spoken in Borneo") - at which point victory is his. McWhorter clearly expects resistance from his readers, as he defiantly sets out to defend such terms as "totally" and "like." Why else would he, like, try so hard? Of course, in the end, resistance is what he meets, when he asks us to agree to Shakespeare translated into modern English (ooh, I don't think so) and to accept that "literally" doesn't cause genuine confusion (except that sometimes it does). But you have to be impressed by him, really. That train won't ever shake him off, will it? It is totally going nowhere without him. How does a person sit with a pile of cards and tea and set about creating definitions? LYNNE TRUSS is the author of "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation." Her latest book, "The Lunar Cats," will be published in Britain this month.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 13, 2016]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
McWhorter (The Language Hoax) will make word snobs clutch their pearls and gasp in dismay as he convincingly argues that they should "shed the contempt: the acrid disgust so many people seem to harbor for people who use the forms [of language] we have been taught are 'bad.'" McWhorter shows the mutability that lies at the core of all language, exploring words that transition from semantic to pragmatic use, the evolution of word meanings, words that become grammar, changes in pronunciation over time, and the ways words combine to form new words. Along the way he specifically addresses infamous irritants such as using "literally" figuratively, uptalk, and speech peppered with "like." Contextualizing them in lexical history, McWhorter shows how they are similar to other changes we now take for granted (such as the evolution of the suffix -like into the common adverbial ending -ly). McWhorter employs a jocular style that makes for smooth reading, without sacrificing the complexity of the subject. Sometimes the humor is a bit stretched, but the overall effect is an unintimidating welcome to readers new to the subject that pleasantly relaxes the discourse of grammar propriety. Agent: Katinka Matson, Brockman. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
Language changes because of people, maintains McWhorter (English and comparative literature, Columbia Univ.; Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue). We understand a new word such as hangry to be a blend of "hungry" and "angry," or hunger-induced anger. We also understand that someone using the word hangry wants to be viewed as modern or "in the know." These transitions in language involve strong alterations in how we pronounce and construct language itself. McWhorter champions acceptance of these changes. Here, he discusses completed and continuing changes, such as the Great Vowel Shift and Northern Cities Vowel Shift. He also explains how words not only change in meaning but become part of grammar (e.g., the suffix -ly originates from the word like, as in warm-like). The final chapter reminds readers that writing is static in a way speech can never be-and not to confuse the two. Verdict McWhorter's fun yet scholarly approach is reminiscent of a favorite professor who makes you laugh and think. Serious readers of linguistic study will be familiar with some of these concepts and examples, but there is more to enjoy in McWhorter's discussions.-Meagan Storey, Virginia Beach © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A brisk look at how and why words change.In his 17th book investigating the variety, history, and idiosyncrasy of language, McWhorter (English and Comparative Literature/Columbia Univ.; The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language, 2014, etc.) enthusiastically makes the case that language is fluid. Its always a safe bet that a word will not be tomorrow what it is today, he writes. Language is something becoming rather than being and ever in flux; the changing is all there is. To support this idea, repeated throughout the book, McWhorter offers myriad, and often fascinating, word histories. The word silly, for example, evolved from meaning blessed to innocent to weak. Some words narrow or broaden their meanings: apple once referred to all fruit, and what we call meat used to be flesh. The author devotes much discussion to literally, which originally meant by the letter but has gained purely figurative usage to mean something closer to actually. McWhorter is not bothered by this drift in meaning, but he realizes that some people are. If the way so many people talk is okay, then what counts as a mistake? he is often asked. He concedes that individual misuse or mispronunciations cant be defended, but he is on the lookout for widespread changes. Nuclear, he writes, is pronounced nucular by some who, he suggests generously, may be modeling it on such words as spectacular and tubular. Tracing patterns of changing sounds, the author notes that when verbs become nouns, the accent shifts backward: Its why someone who re-BELS is a RE-bel. McWhorter also offers an intricate, if not fully convincing, etymology to defend the ubiquitous use of like in popular speech. Although he posits no scientific grounds for considering any way of speaking erroneous in some structural or logical sense, he does acknowledge that some ways of speaking are more appropriate for formal settings than others. As in most of his books, McWhorter proves to be a well-informed and cheerful guide to linguistics. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
