A Modest Construct

Posts tagged `etymology`

¶ Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John McWhorter: Publisher: Gotham; Year: 2008; Pages: 256

One of the benefits of being an armchair linguist is that I have absolutely no qualms about veering from, say, Baugh and Cable’s A History of the English Language or the nominally rebellious but practically canonical works of David Crystal to less academic but infinitely more pleasurable works of dedicated amateurs like Bill Bryson. Our Magnificant Bastard Tongue falls into the latter category (though McWhorter sometimes resembles Crystal in tone), not only because McWhorter is a sort of nuovo-linguist, the sort who would wear sneakers before tweed jackets, but also because this particular book was intended to be a shorter and more information introduction to McWhorter’s sphere… essentially a 250-page brochure for modern linguistics.

§7027 · April 30, 2011 · (No comments) · Tags: Book Reviews, books, etymology, history, linguistics, nonfiction, reviews

¶ Wednesday’s Word: murder

murder: n. An act of deliberate killing of another human being.

Murder is a word which is familiar to just about every English speaker in the world; it gets used every day in newspapers and television, especially given the glut of crime shows on the air recently. Every Law & Order or CSI uses it, though mostly in the criminological sense of an intentional killing (“malice aforethought” is, I believe, the part official definition for murder in the first degree).

§6026 · March 23, 2011 · (No comments) · Tags: etymology, linguistics, Wednesday's Word

¶ Through the Language Glass

Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher: Publisher: Metropolitan; Year: 2010; Pages: 320

Those of you who know grammar snobs (I am admittedly one, myself) may be tempted to think that we are all William Safires, wrinkling our noses at slang and treating publicly-dangled participles like a fart in church. In fact, linguists (as distinct from grammatical pedants) are a pretty liberal bunch, or at least those of us studying since the second half of the twentieth century.

§6294 · January 14, 2011 · 3 comments · Tags: Book Reviews, books, etymology, linguistics, nonfiction, reviews

¶ Wednesday’s Word: kitchen

kitchen: n. A room or area for preparing food.

A coworker mused aloud just the other day, “Why is it we have bedroom, dining room, living room, bathroom and….. kitchen.”

Why indeed? Of course, we are simplifying things a bit too much, excluding even current room names like basement, foyer, and office, and more archaic room names like boudoir, parlor, and study. But nonetheless, why the preponderance of -rooms and the rather unique “kitchen” in our modern household terminology?

§5994 · September 29, 2010 · (No comments) · Tags: etymology, history, linguistics, Wednesday's Word

¶ Wednesday’s Word: politics

politics: n. The practice of responding to conflict with dialogue.; n. Set of policies relating to governmental and legal matters.

Gore Vidal once famously quipped that “‘Politics’ is made up of two words, ‘poli,’ which is Greek for ‘many,’ and ‘tics,’ which are blood-sucking insects”, and that’s perhaps one of the nicer things said about the practice and its practitioners. It seems as though politics has always been reviled, even back to the earliest statesmen.

§5928 · September 15, 2010 · (No comments) · Tags: etymology, linguistics, Wednesday's Word