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    The Story of English in 100 Words
    The Story of English in 100 Words
    The Story of English in 100 Words
    Ebook305 pages4 hours

    The Story of English in 100 Words

    By David Crystal

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    About this ebook

    The world's foremost expert on the English language takes us on an entertaining and eye-opening tour of the history of our vernacular through the ages.

    In The Story of English in 100 Words, an entertaining history of the world's most ubiquitous language, David Crystal draws on one hundred words that best illustrate the huge variety of sources, influences and events that have helped to shape our vernacular since the first definitively English word—‘roe'—was written down on the femur of a roe deer in the fifth century. Featuring ancient words (‘loaf'), cutting edge terms that relfect our world (‘twittersphere'), indispensible words that shape our tongue (‘and', ‘what'), fanciful words (‘fopdoodle') and even obscene expressions (the "c word"...), David Crystal takes readers on a tour of the winding byways of our language via the rude, the obscure and the downright surprising.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateMar 27, 2012
    ISBN9781466805088
    The Story of English in 100 Words
    Author

    David Crystal

    David Crystal works from his home in Holyhead, North Wales, as a writer, editor, lecturer and broadcaster. He has published extensively on the history and development of English, including The Stories of English, Evolving English and Spell It Out: The Singular Story of English Spelling. He and his son Ben joined forces to co-write You Say Potato and The Oxford Illustrated Dictionary of Shakespeare. He held a chair at the University of Reading for ten years, and is Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Bangor. He was 'Master of Original Pronunciation' at Shakespeare's Globe in London for its productions of Romeo and Juliet and Troilus and Cressida in 2004-5, and has since acted as an accent consultant for other such productions worldwide.

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    Reviews for The Story of English in 100 Words

    4/5

    18 ratings22 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Very clever. Crystal uses each word as a starting point for a brief discussion on the ways our language has changed and developed over the centuries, reminding us all of the idiocy of such movements as "language reform", and of the joy we should feel every time we piece together a sentence. We're not just using a language. We're working with a breathing mass of orphans, stragglers, immigrants, and naturalised citizens from so many languages and cultures, now working together in an often unstable and cacophonic new world. And I love it.
    • 3/5
      A cute overview of ways that words enter the mainstream language. Calling it "the story" of English is maybe a bit much, though.
    • 5/5
      Another fantastic book from David Crystal. You do learn about the history of the language, and the origins of the words are often suprising.
    • 4/5
      Entertaining. Small nuggets of info on English words.
    • 3/5
      I really enjoyed this book, learned the first English word and "Bill and Ted" even gotten a section under the word dude. My favorite of the 100 words was fopdoodle, fop a fool, doodle a simpleton thus fopdoodle was a fool twice. Luckily the author was only a fopdoodle once that I caught when he credited Thomas Edison for the invention of the telephone instead of Alexander G. Bell. But it's a book about words not inventions.
    • 3/5
      David Crystal uses 100 words as a framework to illustrate how English has developed. I really enjoyed this and felt it addresssed some of the problems I had with his other book that I read 'Stories of English' that didn't really talk much about particular words.
    • 5/5
      I thoroughly enjoyed this look at the English language. David Crystal presents 100 words, each one illustrating a concept in the development and evolution of our language. He talks about borrowed words, spelling changes, suffixes becoming words, the influence of new technologies on language development. Absolutely fascinating!
    • 4/5
      I'm a word nerd, so I found this book very interesting and very accessible. After very short historical explanation of how the English language came to be. "...English is a vacuum cleaner of a language, whose users suck in words from other languages whenever they encounter them." Crystal has chosen 100 words to examine and analyze, looking at their contribution the language as a whole. Each word has a brief explanation, that is humorously and thoughtfully written. Examples: roe -- 5th century -- 1st written English word, identifiable as such. It was carved on a deer bone -- naming it as from a certain species. Some other fun examples: bone-house, a word painting (kenning) from the 10th century to mean the human body. "cuckoo" -- 13th century -- a word that describes a sound (onomatopoeia) more than the creature; Watergate -- the use of a place name (toponym) as a noun or verb; strine -- a word coined for comic effect, usually playing off its pronunciation, more than its actual spelling. (e.g. "ickle, = little sly drool = slide rule). The most important word of the 20th century? "jazz." If this book doesn't help you win Jeopardy or Trivial Pursuit, nothing will.
    • 4/5
      A fascinating book to dip in to. I wish it was more detailed.
    • 4/5
      Excellent. Very readable and entertaining.
    • 4/5
      A fascinating and entertaining tour through the English language with a learned and witty guide.
    • 4/5
      A thoroughly enjoyable book with some fascinating word histories and a useful book to have read when chatting up philologists.
    • 4/5
      An interesting collection of words that Crystal thinks defines the English language. Either because they are new, or have been borrowed from all the people that have invaded in the past. If you like language, well worth a read.
    • 3/5
      Quite interesting survey of word origins, well presented. Makes a good bogread.
    • 3/5
      This book was definitely worth writing and listening to. However, the chosen structure, 100 tiny little essays, makes the book unmemorable. Already I have no idea what the first word was or what its associated chapter was about.
    • 3/5
      I love reading about etymology and the evolution of the English language, so I was predisposed to enjoy this one. The only problem I had was that it didn't feel long enough and I keep wanting each section to go into more depth, but that was a function of the intended structure of the book--briefly studying 100 specific words as representative of entire branches of the language. For what it was, it was both informative and entertaining.
    • 3/5
      A fun format for a book on language. It doesn't tell me that much that I didn't know, but it was fun to flip through anyway, and it gives the truth behind a couple of myths (like the origins of the word "okay"). Some of it's pretty amusing, too.
    • 4/5
      I love words and the origin of words and I loved this book.
    • 4/5
      Fun and interesting.
    • 3/5
      Using 100 words as examples, a linguist discusses and illustrates the many ways in which the English vocabulary has evolved. Not all of his examples are fit for family reading, however. Witness the verboten C word.
    • 5/5
      A quick romp through the history of our language, including word borrowing, spelling evolutions, grammar trivia, British vs. American vs. Every one else's English, eponyms, and everything else to remind us that the English language is not stagnant. Crystal's writing style is densely informative without being dry. Each sentence adds a new little tidbit of information, his illustrative stories never seem tacked on or forced, and humor is used just enough for good laughs without cheapening his work.
    • 5/5
      This is a book about the depth of language. It is also an enticing chronological etymological selection box. It is not so much 'the story' of English as a random series of insights but it is debatable if a complete story is possible at all. Language, as Wittgenstein suggested, is the city we live in. Crystal's short tours are highly genial and entertaining.

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    The Story of English in 100 Words - David Crystal

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