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Words on the Move
- Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally)
- Narrated by: John McWhorter
- Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins
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Publisher's summary
A best-selling linguist takes us on a lively tour of how the English language is evolving before our eyes - and why we should embrace this transformation and not fight it.
Language is always changing - but we tend not to like it. We understand that new words must be created for new things, but the way English is spoken today rubs many of us the wrong way. Whether it's the use of literally to mean "figuratively" rather than "by the letter" or the way young people use LOL and like, or business jargon like what's the ask? - it often seems as if the language is deteriorating before our eyes.
But the truth is different and a lot less scary, as John McWhorter shows in this delightful and eye-opening exploration of how English has always been in motion and continues to evolve today. Drawing examples from everyday life and employing a generous helping of humor, he shows that these shifts are a natural process common to all languages and that we should embrace and appreciate these changes, not condemn them.
Words on the Move opens our eyes to the surprising backstories to the words and expressions we use every day. Did you know that silly once meant "blessed"? Or that ought was the original past tense of owe? Or that the suffix -ly in adverbs is actually a remnant of the word like? And have you ever wondered why some people from New Orleans sound as if they come from Brooklyn?
McWhorter encourages us to marvel at the dynamism and resilience of the English language, and his book offers a lively journey through which we discover that words are ever on the move, and our lives are all the richer for it.
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Wasteful
- By ABID on 12-05-13
By: Roy Peter Clark
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Words and Rules
- The Ingredients of Language
- By: Steven Pinker
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 13 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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First published in 2000, Words and Rules remains one of Pinker's most provocative and accessible books, illuminating the fascinating relationship between the brain, the mind, and how language makes us humans.
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Amazing how much irregular verbs can teach.
- By Tristan on 04-10-16
By: Steven Pinker
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Poetry in Person
- Twenty-five Years of Conversation with America's Poets
- By: Lucille Clifton, Alexander Neubauer - editor, Eamon Grennan, and others
- Narrated by: Alexander Neubauer
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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This first audio edition of Poetry in Person: 25 Years of Conversation with America’s Poets (Knopf, 2010), invites listeners into an intimate classroom with eight acclaimed poets. Full of compelling, in-depth conversation about manuscripts and drafts by the poets themselves, plus readings of the finished poems, these historic recordings offer one of the most detailed portraits ever produced of how poems are actually made.
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Fascinating
- By d on 08-28-16
By: Lucille Clifton, and others
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You Say Potato: A Book About Accents
- By: Ben Crystal, David Crystal
- Narrated by: David Crystal, Ben Crystal, Jane Savage, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Some people say 'sconn' while others say 'schown'. He says 'bath' while she says 'bahth'. You say 'potayto'. I say 'potahto'. And - wait a second, no one says 'potahto'. No one's ever said 'potahto'. Have they? From reconstructing Shakespeare's accent to the rise and fall of received pronunciation, actor Ben Crystal and his linguist father, David, travel the world in search of the stories of spoken English.
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Wish there were more native recordings.
- By Matt Dobler on 07-01-16
By: Ben Crystal, and others
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Born to Kvetch
- Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods
- By: Michael Wex
- Narrated by: Michael Wex
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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As the main spoken language of the Jews for more than a thousand years, Yiddish has had plenty to lament, plenty to conceal. Its phrases and expressions paint a comprehensive picture of the mind-set that enabled the Jews of Europe to survive persecution: they never stopped kvetching about God, gentiles, children, and everything else.
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Fascinating, but...
- By Christopher B. on 04-05-16
By: Michael Wex
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The Elements of Eloquence
- Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase
- By: Mark Forsyth
- Narrated by: Don Hagen
- Length: 5 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In his inimitably entertaining and wonderfully witty style, he takes apart famous phrases and shows how you too can write like Shakespeare or quip like Oscar Wilde. Whether you’re aiming to achieve literary immortality or just hoping to deliver the perfect one-liner, The Elements of Eloquence proves that you don’t need to have anything important to say - you simply need to say it well.
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Who knew rhetoric could be so much fun?
- By Philo on 10-30-14
By: Mark Forsyth
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How to Write Short
- Word Craft for Fast Times
- By: Roy Peter Clark
- Narrated by: Roy Peter Clark
- Length: 5 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In How to Write Short , Roy Peter Clark turns his attention to the art of painting a thousand pictures with just a few words. Short forms of writing have always existed - from ship logs and telegrams to prayers and haikus. But in this ever-changing Internet age, short-form writing has become an essential skill. Clark covers how to write effective and powerful titles, headlines, essays, sales pitches, Tweets, letters, and even self-descriptions for online dating services.
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Ironically long
- By Amazon Customer on 03-14-16
By: Roy Peter Clark
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Babel No More
- The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners
- By: Michael Erard
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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We all learn at least one language as children. But what does it take to learn six languages...or seventy? In Babel No More, Michael Erard, "a monolingual with benefits," sets out on a quest to meet language superlearners and make sense of their mental powers. On the way he uncovers the secrets of historical figures like Italian cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, who was said to speak seventy-two languages; Emil Krebs, a pugnacious German diplomat, who spoke sixty-eight languages; and Lomb Kat, a Hungarian who taught herself Russian by reading Russian romance novels.
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Heavy on anecdote, light on science
- By S. Yates on 07-15-16
By: Michael Erard
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How to Speak and Write Correctly
- By: Joseph Devlin
- Narrated by: Shawn Grisden
- Length: 4 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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This book has no pretension about it whatever -- it is neither a Manual of Rhetoric, expatiating on the dogmas of style, nor a Grammar full of arbitrary rules and exceptions. It is merely an effort to help ordinary, everyday people to express themselves in ordinary, everyday language, in a proper manner.
By: Joseph Devlin
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The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead
- Dos and Don'ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life
- By: Charles Murray
- Narrated by: Charles Murray
- Length: 3 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Best-selling social historian Charles Murray has written a delightfully fussy - and entertaining - book on the hidden rules of the road in the workplace - and in life - from the standpoint of an admonishing, but encouraging, workplace grouch and taskmaster. Why the curmudgeon? The fact is that most older, more senior people in the workplace are closet curmudgeons. In today's politically correct world, they may hide their displeasure over your misuse of grammar or your overly familiar use of their first name without an express invitation. But don't be fooled by their pleasant demeanor....
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Good Book: From one curmudgeon to another
- By DaWoolf on 05-22-14
By: Charles Murray
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The Pun Also Rises
- How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics
- By: John Pollack
- Narrated by: Pete Larkin
- Length: 4 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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The Pun Also Rises is an authoritative yet playful exploration of a practice that is common, in one form or another, to virtually every language on earth. At once entertaining and educational, this engaging book answers fundamental questions: Just what is a pun, and why do people make them? How did punning impact the development of human language, and how did that drive creativity and progress? And why, after centuries of decline, does the pun still matter?
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Punderful Little Book
- By B. Lane on 01-10-13
By: John Pollack
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How Fiction Works
- By: James Wood
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Ranging widely from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings, Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. He sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision, resulting in nothing less than a philosophy of the novel, which has won critical acclaim nationwide, from the San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Times Book Review.
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Educational!
- By Don on 05-04-09
By: James Wood
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Professor John McWhorter of Columbia University takes you back through time and around the world, following the linguistic trails left by generations of humans that lead back to the beginnings of language. Utilizing historical theories and cutting-edge research, these 34 astonishing lectures will introduce you to the major language families of the world and their many offspring, including a variety of languages that are no longer spoken but provide vital links between past and present.
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Embark on a journey to the very beginning of writing as a tool of language and see how the many threads of history and linguistics came together to create the alphabet that forms the foundation of English writing. Your guide is Professor John McWhorter of Columbia University and in the 16 lectures of Ancient Writing and the History of the Alphabet, he will help you navigate the complex linguistic and cultural history behind one of our most crucial tools of communication.
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The Etymologicon is a completely unauthorized guide to the strange underpinnings of the English language. It explains: How you get from “gruntled” to “disgruntled”; why you are absolutely right to believe that your meager salary barely covers “money for salt”; how the biggest chain of coffee shops in the world (hint: Seattle) connects to whaling in Nantucket; and what precisely the Rolling Stones have to do with gardening.
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Maddening! Does not work as an audiobook!
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Almost everyone swears, or worries about not swearing, from the two year-old who has just discovered the power of potty mouth to the grandma who wonders why every other word she hears is obscene. Whether they express anger or exhilaration, are meant to insult or to commend, swear words perform a crucial role in language. But swearing is also a uniquely well-suited lens through which to look at history, offering a fascinating record of what people care about on the deepest levels of a culture - what's divine, what's terrifying, and what's taboo.
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WHERE IS THE REFERENCE MATERIAL PDF????
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Best-selling author and acclaimed linguist John McWhorter argues that an illiberal neoracism, disguised as antiracism, is hurting Black communities and weakening the social fabric. In Woke Racism, McWhorter reveals the workings of this new religion, from the original sin of 'white privilege' and the weaponisation of cancel culture to ban heretics, to the evangelical fervour of the 'woke mob'.
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I’m not as “woke” as I thought.
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The Prodigal Tongue
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"If Shakespeare were alive today, he'd sound like an American." "English accents are the sexiest." "Americans have ruined the English language." "Technology means everyone will have to speak the same English." Such claims about the English language are often repeated but rarely examined. Professor Lynne Murphy is on the linguistic front line. In The Prodigal Tongue she explores the fiction and reality of the special relationship between British and American English.
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TOO MUCH BITTERNESS
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The Language Instinct
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In this classic, the world’s expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association....
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Absolutely Amazing and Interesting
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This is the remarkable story of the English language; from its beginnings as a minor guttural Germanic dialect to its position today as a truly established global language. The Adventure of English is not only an enthralling story of power, religion, and trade, but also the story of people, and how their lives continue to change the extraordinary language that is English.
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Many Of Course monments
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On Language
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Described by the New York Times as "arguably the most important intellectual alive," Noam Chomsky is known throughout the world for his highly influential writings on language and politics. Featuring two of Chomsky's most popular and enduring books in one omnibus volume, On Language contains some of the noted linguist and political critic's most informal and accessible work to date, making it an ideal introduction to his thought.
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Difficult in audio format
- By Commuting Learner on 09-19-16
By: Noam Chomsky, and others
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Linguistics
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- By: P.H. Matthews
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- Unabridged
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Linguistics falls in the gap between arts and science, on the edges of which the most fascinating discoveries and the most important problems are found. Rather than following the conventional organization of many contemporary introductions to the subject, the author of this stimulating guide begins his discussion with the oldest, "arts" end of the subject and moves chronologically through to the newest research - the "science" aspects.
By: P.H. Matthews
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Writing Creative Nonfiction
- By: Tilar J J. Mazzeo, The Great Courses
- Narrated by: Tilar J J. Mazzeo
- Length: 12 hrs and 16 mins
- Original Recording
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Bringing together the imaginative strategies of fiction storytelling and new ways of narrating true, real-life events, creative nonfiction is the fastest-growing part of the creative writing world. It's a cutting-edge genre that's reshaping how we write (and read) everything from biographies and memoirs to blogs and public speaking scripts to personal essays and magazine articles.
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Not what I expected but useful
- By Nancy on 04-14-14
By: Tilar J J. Mazzeo, and others
What listeners say about Words on the Move
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Margaret
- 09-25-16
Review By a Fan
I follow Prof. McWhorter--listen to his books, watch his Ted Talks; if he were to give a lecture in my town, I'd buy a ticket. He has several themes he returns to over and over again: that languages evolve, that English is not spoken correctly vs. incorrectly, but in dialects, the effect of texting on the language and so on. He hits them again in Words on the Move.
Some people might eventually find this slightly repetitive, but not me. I like his jokes, his anecdotes and--occasionally--his total goofy nerdiness. (His comprehensive knowledge of vintage sit coms, for example.) So I'm giving this five stars because I enjoy all of the above. If you don't, you'll still like the book, but you may not feel motivated to award five stars. I totally get that. You do you, I do me...
Recommend.
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62 people found this helpful
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- Golanka
- 10-02-16
Literally A Great Listen
John McWhorter has a knack for explaining linguistic concepts engagingly. This time, he's focusing on how language changes over time--words changing meaning and pronunciation.
In a relatively short book, the reader/listener learns quite a bit. I also learned to relax a bit about the "right" way to say things. It still jars me to hear someone say, "I literally died!," but I don't get so irritated (or even aggravated).
The subject matter lends itself perfectly to the audio-book format, and McWhorter's narration is clear and enjoyable. I read some of the book, but it was so good to listen to that I didn't skip ahead after reading--I listened to the same parts that I had just read.
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54 people found this helpful
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- Jeremy Lavine
- 09-20-16
Funny and insightful. Some material reused.
Entertaining and informative material and great reading as expected, but there's a fair amount of overlap in material with McWhorter's previous books and Lexicon Valley podcast, and it's a bit shallower than his previous books. Wouldn't get it in hard-cover, but the audio format is worth it.
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43 people found this helpful
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- Spinoza
- 12-13-16
Listening is better
The author/narrator pronounces the subtleties of language so well and so interestingly that I cannot imagine the printed page could capture the experience. His delivery is delightful, his content is marvelous.
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36 people found this helpful
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- Theodore
- 09-12-16
Best to listen to, not read, this book
For those who are familiar with - and enjoy - McWhorter's lectures on Great Courses, you will want to listen to all his quirky tangents, fun affected accents, and crucial pronunciations. Trying to get all of this from the written page wouldn't work in my opinion. And the limits of written language is, like, one of his points. Found the content very interesting, but I am not a linguist and am not in position to judge the validity, novelty, etc. Certainly a fun listen though.
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27 people found this helpful
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- A. Yoshida
- 06-15-17
For Word Lovers
The author provides great examples of the depth of meaning that words can have. For example, "well, frankly no" has a different meaning than "frankly no" and "he didn't even bring a gift" is different from "he didn't bring a gift." A non-native English speaker may not understand why one word gives the sentence a different meaning. In fact, an English speaker might find it hard to explain what that one word means in those sentences. Word usage is changing as we speak. LOL used to mean laughing out loud - a text so funny that you're letting the recipient know you're literally laughing. Now, LOL = chuckle = haha = amusing, but rarely does it actually mean laughing. These things make you think, "Hum, I've not thought about that before. Interesting."
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- Mike Ferring
- 03-31-17
Accessible Textbook
If you're a student of the English language, and I mean a serious student, you'll likely find this fascinating. John McWhorter offers a dazzling level of erudition leavened with wit. If you're not a serious student of the English language, and listening to this confirmed that I'm not, then it's much too academic despite his stabs at humor. Here's a summary: words and grammar move and change and this can't be stopped nor do we want it to stop. If he says this once he says it 500 times. I was grinding through the book in spite of its density until the chapter on how vowels have moved in the mouth. Oooo. Just oooo. Too much. Too thick for me. For the rest of you: have at it.
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- Cora
- 03-30-18
McWhorter Explores Language
I really enjoy listening to John McWhorter's books and lectures. This book was well narrated and contained many fascinating facts about language, which I appreciate. John McWhorter's narrations are pleasant to listen to and consistently bring the subject covered to life.
The only negative comment that I can make is that I found the chapters lacking in clear organization. I felt they were not crisply themed and were a little rambling to follow. I did not enjoy that aspect of this book. However, that said, Words on the Move contained a good deal of engaging and helpful information. Speaking in defense of the slightly rambling organization, I might say that for some that style might evoke a conversational and informal feeling.
This book did not disappoint, overall. Even with the above noted limitations or really quibbles I enjoyed the book so much that I finished it at a much faster rate than normal. Recommended if you like reading about linguistics and how language changes over time.
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16 people found this helpful
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- PapaFrer
- 09-29-16
Like I'm a language dork
I so like John McWhoter's take on language and how it changes. It always beautiful or fascinating and never wrong.
It might not be practical but I sure enjoyed it.
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14 people found this helpful
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- Philomath
- 09-11-16
Fascinating aspects of language
As with his lectures, John McWhorter's narration makes the book come alive. The author is to say the least an incredibly engaging communicator.
The book explains language, as being fluid and temporal. Words and pronunciations are continuously going through transformations too gradually for us to take real notice.
For those who believe that there is a proper way to speak. The answer is only as far as it helps to communicate better. But words are morphed and recreated continuously. The new ways of speaking and texting, seen by many as deforming the language, have actually quite a bit of depth, where words become the communicator of feelings.
This is not a new phenomena. What we call proper English would probably be looked at as deformed by Shakespeare's English in the very same way we are uncomfortable with the changing uses of words.
Excellent book. Highly recommended to anyone fascinated with language and how words change with time.
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