It’s
always a joy to curl up with a book like Caroline Taggart’s Misadventures in the English Language. If you love words, as I do, you’ll enjoy this
lively look at vocabulary, punctuation, parts of speech, sentence structure,
the creation of new words and all things English.
If
you want to know what kind of writer Caroline is, let her say it in her words: “I believe in precise language, the right word in the right place. I think it’s a
shame to lose nuances (such as the much argued-over differences between
uninterested and disinterested) for want of paying a little attention,
punctuation is there to help convey meanings; so is correct spelling. Obeying grammatical rules can help avoid
ambiguity – if you say what you mean, you don’t have to shrug and say, “Well,
you know what I mean.’”
She
proposes a short list of expressions she’d love to see disappear, including:
·
The
elephant in the room.
·
Firing
on all cylinders
·
On
message
·
Seeing
how it will pan out.
·
Win-win
situation.
·
Taking
your eye off the ball.
She
also notes how words can be confusing:
·
Apprise
(advise) vs. appraise (assess).
·
Averse
vs. adverse.
·
Disinterested
vs, uninterested.
·
Imply
vs. infer.
Her
book dances with split infinitives dangling participles, auxiliary verbs, and
all facets of grammar. But it doesn’t
come off as elitist, boring, or stuffy.
She makes it fun to understand the building blocks of our language.
She
also throws some foreign words at us that have been adopted into our lexicon,
from vendetta and schlep to tete-a-tete and schaden freude (German
expression: the pleasure we feel at
someone else’s misfortune).
Early
on she discusses how new words - or neologisms -- come to be and notes how we get
them from a variety of sources, including:
·
New
coinages that cover new inventions, discoveries, or developments-television,
amphetamine, Internet.
·
Words
formed from amalgamating two or more existing words -- workaholic, brunch, blog,
motel.
·
Words
adopted from others languages, such as foods (spaghetti) or other fashions,
utensils, building styles, etc.
·
They
come from existing words whose meanings are now applied to some new phenomena,
such as satellite, disc, file, forum or avatar -- all words that had been used for
something different than how we think of them today.
I
leave you with a few passages that cover topics that may interest you:
Apostrophes
If
we were to abandon them, think what confusion there would be in the use of
words such as wont, cant, well, ill, hell, shell and were.
Okay, it is not difficult to tell from the context the difference
between, say, We found a pretty shell on
the beach and if you ask her nicely, shell drive you to the station, or Hell for leather and Hell be with you in a minute.
But, as with my ‘I was in a state of course’ example earlier, it might
make a reader pause for a moment to work out what you mean. That would interrupt the flow of his or her
reading and, as an author, you don’t (donut) want that, do you?
Punctuation
Punctuation
may be the bane of many people’s lives, but its intentions are entirely
honorable: it’s there to help. It should
– it really should – clarify meaning, indicate emphasis, distinguish a
statement from a question or an exclamation and show where one train of thought
stops and another begins.
Spelling
We
hear a lot about the illogicality of English spelling - the many pronunciations of ough, for example (borough, bough, brought, cough, dough, rough, to name but six); the
silent letters in castle, gnome, psychology and thumb; and the fact that mint
doesn’t rhyme with pint while main rhymes with both rein and reign and row can rhyme
with either cow or show, depending on whether you are
having an argument or competing in a boat race.
It makes English a joy for lovers of puns and crosswords and something
of an ordeal for foreigners.
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