The Daily Mail had an article today (here) on David Crystal's new book -- The Story of English in 100 Words. The book contains lots of snippets from different areas of language study, according to the article. So, differences in British English and American English are considered (eg, aerial/antenna, petrol/gas), the Old Norse legacy (eg in words such as skirt, yard and kirk), posh and common words (lavatory vs toilet) and the changing fortunes and meanings of individual words (eg twitter and text). The Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is also discussed in the book, and Crystal notes that its first word Hwaet, literally 'what' although used at the time as a way of getting attention, became the 'What ho' uttered by Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster.
There is a chapter on swearing and on words which appeared for the first time in William Tyndale's translation of the Bible in 1525, Shakespeare's works and the works of Shakespeare's contemporary Thomas Nashe (who gave us conundrum, grandiloquent, multifarious and balderdash).
Here's the article/review.
On a completely different topic, does anyone know how someone can arrange to have my blog posts delivered to their email? I was contacted by a reader who wanted to subscribe but couldn't get the Subscribe link to work. I have no knowledge of technical matters at all, nor do I have a Facebook, Twitter or similar account to use as a distribution method. If anyone can give advice, please reply below, or privately to my email address, which is virtuallinguist, all one word, and then googlemail.com. Thanks.
RSS feeds don't work for me either. I just reached out to one of my techie guys. Stay tuned.
Posted by: John | November 11, 2011 at 11:17 PM
Thanks for your help, and email, John. Also thanks to everyone else who gave advice. I think I've managed to set up an email subscription form above now, plus an RSS feed.
Posted by: Virtual Linguist | November 12, 2011 at 02:23 PM
Great job with the feed solution!
Posted by: John | November 12, 2011 at 03:50 PM
I have been looking for this kind of article since long when eventually i searched on google.com and find this. Thanks for such wonderful work.
Posted by: Website Design | November 21, 2011 at 10:17 AM