Blooming English by Kate Burridge
I love the Cambridge University Press. Just thought I’d throw that in there. Actually I love all university presses. Because I am a NERD. Moving on, this book is full of lovely little articles on some of the eccentricities of the English language. Quirky things like blending, yod dropping, the creation and death of affixes, suffixes and -ixes of all kinds, all kinds of fun stuff.
This is mighty odd considering I HATED the required linguistics courses I took for my anthro degree. It was a fun book, read in fits and starts, as it was meant to be. All the articles were taken from her radio show, so none are long and all are easy to read. She is an Aussie, so a few of her references are a little outside my American head, but she is really quite readable. It amazing there aren’t more linguists with such a knack.
Highly recommend. You get lots interesting trivia to entertain your friends-Did you know that gradable adjectives of more that two syllables are losing or have already lost their ending? For example- we still say big, bigger and biggest, but not beautifuller or beautifulest. We used to say such things, the author brings up Lewis Carroll and Shakespeare as examples (’curiouser’ and ‘horrider’) even one syllable adjectives may lose their endings in the future. Interesting, no?
I still haven’t set a standard for how I’m going to review books yet, so we’ll go with the standard star method. 4 1/2 stars.
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