Can I Have a Word with You? - Howard Richler
Can I Have a Word with You? - Howard Richler
In his fifth book about language, Howard Richler moves through the alphabet from A to Z singling out words that may look innocuous but contain treasures of hidden meanings. Especially intriguing for Richler is how words change their meanings and develop layered connotations, involving us in a complex and often involuntary language game. Witty and erudite, Richler invites readers into the intimacy of language and allows us to delight in the ever-shifting glories of English. Among the questions he asks are --
What is the proper designation for a person older than sixty-five?
What constitutes "marriage"?
Should "niggardly" be regarded as offensive?
Not since Lynn Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves has a book about language been so hilarious and informative. This book is a must not only for the bookshelves of all logophiles, but also as the bible for the many family members and friends whose get-togethers often spark lively linguistic argument.
This book was, quite frankly, disappointing. To begin with, I really have to take issue with the copy editing. Most of the errors I found were relatively minor, such as leaving off the letter S, leading to subject-verb disagreements and the like, but there were a few doozies. Among the more egregious were a reference to Shakespeare's Three Gentlemen of Verona [sic] on page 92, and the following sentence from page 154, which doesn't even make sense: "'Amexica,' a blend of American and English [sic], reflects the blending of Spanish and English into what is often called Spanglish." This is clearly wrong, and someone should have caught it. I expect better from all books, but especially those dealing with the English language.
Aside from that, this book was interesting, but oddly structured. It's divided into chapters, each supposedly dealing with a word, and the various meanings it has acquired through the ages. This is what I was expecting when I picked it up, and this is what I was looking forward to. It's actually a little broader in scope than that. The chapter on "blurb," for example, isn't just about the word "blurb," but rather, it's about a whole whack of words that were just invented out of pretty much nowhere. And it's that way the whole way through. The words discussed in various chapters are thematically linked in one way or another, but I don't think there are any chapters devoted solely to one individual word. Some chapters are not even really about the word used as the header. "Aptronym," "Mondegreen," "Retronym," and "Spanglish," for example, are not really about any of those words. Instead, each of those chapters discusses words that would fit those categories. Which is really an entirely different discussion.
Furthermore, to suggest that this book would make good reference material, or would serve as a "bible" for linguistic arguments, is rather far-fetched, because there is no way to find anything in particular. The only "index" it has just lists the header words, and thus is more like a table of contents than an index. But if the word in dispute is one of the many others discussed, there is no way to find it. If you happen to have read the book cover-to-cover, and happen to remember which category the word in question fell, you might be able to track it down. If not, though, it would be a major pain to try and track it down. So as a reference book, basically useless.
So yeah, there's some interesting stuff in it, if you can get past the typos and whatnot, but it won't exactly be getting a cherished place in my collection of word-nerd reference books.
Next up: The Digital Plague, by Jeff Somers