The Stories of English by David Crystal
534 pages
Published 2004
Read from July 21(?) to July 29
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
This is the first review I'm writing after the great laptop disaster. It is Weird As Hell typing on a keyboard with a working E key. I keep wanting to hit CTRL-V every single time there's an E coming up. My fingers keep fouling each other on the keyboard. It doesn't help that this is a big clacky keyboard of the sort libraries have been using for the last decade or two. Give me a laptop keyboard almost any day. So long as all the keys actually work.
Anyway, this was a pretty good book. Much more informative than Bryson's Mother Tongue, albeit far less entertaining. Crystal doesn't become utterly dry at any point, but it does seem to drag on a bit in spots. As usual with me, I most enjoyed the chapters dealing with the oldest permutations of the language; I annoyed Jen with my constant attempts to sound out the Old English bits sprinkled throughout the first part of the book. But even the post-Tudor material was interesting to me, in part because my knowledge of British history peters out by Elizabeth's time. For a book with the stated goal of "telling the stories" of dialect English, of "non-standard" language, it's really kind of baffling how so little space gets devoted to English overseas; between them, American, Canadian, Australian, Indian, and African Englishes get maybe an entire chapter of coverage.
I'm sure there was a lot more I could have said about this book if I cared to, but I haven't had to write anything on a public library terminal in ages, and between that and this keyboard, the whole situation is not conducive to profound thought.
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