2010 Holiday Gift Books

22 November 2010

It’s that time of year again. For those looking to buy a gift for the logophile in their life, including those who want to treat themselves, here are a few suggestions.

Linguist David Crystal is one of the most prolific writers on language, and his books are uniformly engrossing and well-researched. This year, in time for the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible, Crystal takes a look at how that 1611 book influenced the English language in Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language.

Another recently published book is Allan Metcalf’s OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word. Metcalf traces the history of this most American of words from its origin as a lame joke in an 1839 newspaper all the way to Ned Flanders’s “okeley dokely.”

One of the most interesting language book published of 2010 is Guy Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. Deutscher reviews the research behind the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and explores how language influences the way in which we think.

For those looking for something in a historical overview of the English language, Jack Lynch’s The Lexicographer’s Dilemma: The Evolution of “Proper” English, from Shakespeare to South Park may be just the ticket. If you want to read about how humans began to speak, how Samuel Johnson created his dictionary, or how Philip Gove and the Webster’s Third New International Dictionary shocked the English-speaking world, this is the book.

For professional writers and academics, two of the primary research-oriented style guides have been updated this year. The Chicago Manual of Style is now in its sixteenth edition. And the Modern Language Association has published the seventh edition of its MLA Handbook. Both are essential for academics and students, and Chicago is a must for any professional writer.

On the lighter side, there is Charles Harrington Elster’s The Accidents of Style: Good Advice on How Not to Write Badly. Elster provides a “crash course” on how to avoid the potholes and fender benders that make traveling the writing highway hazardous. I have a more complete review of Elster’s book here.

The Bodleian Library has reprinted the New Dictionary of Terms, Ancient and Modern, of the Canting Crew by B. E. Gentleman. The 2010 title of this venerable work is The First English Dictionary of Slang, 1699. It’s a snapshot of what English slang was like three hundred years ago.

There are of course some old standbys that make great gifts. And if you don’t have these on your shelf, you should definitely put them on your wish list for this year.

Jesse Sheidlower’s The F Word is the definitive history of that most taboo of English words. Sheidlower not only gives us the history, but provides detailed lexicographic entries for all the various forms the word comes in and uses it is put it.

Fred Shapiro’s The Yale Book of Quotations is undoubtedly the finest quotations book on the market. It is both comprehensive and thoroughly researched. If you have only one book of quotes on your shelf, this should be the one.

When it comes to style guides, there are two that are a must for anyone serious about writing. The first is Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. This volume provides a complete historical overview for all those pesky rules of usage. Not only does it tell you what the rule is, but it tells you why. The second is Garner’s Modern American Usage. Usage expert Bryan Garner is a bit conservative and prescriptive for my taste, but he doesn’t steer you wrong. No one ever got in trouble following Garner’s advice.

Finally, of course, there is my own Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends. If you don’t have this one already, what are you waiting for?

(Disclosure: I received free review copies of some of these books. Oxford University Press, the publisher of many of them, is also the publisher of my book, Word Myths. Additionally, if you click through the links and make a purchase, I receive a very small referral payment from Amazon.com.)

Why Teach the Humanities?

20 November 2010

A biologist gives his perspective. I’m not sure I like the ad hominem criticism of Mr. Philip, but this is a very cogent defense of the humanities and explanation of the function of a university.

A university education is not just about getting a higher salary, that’s what trade schools are for. The purpose of a university is to extend the bounds of human knowledge and to help prepare young adults become more productive members of society at large, not just make them more productive workers. There is nothing wrong with a university focusing on particular areas of excellence, but such focus should not include the elimination of entire disciplines from the curriculum. Nor should such focus be determined by consideration of profit and loss. There is reason that universities are non-profit institutions. The value of the university’s output does not map well onto the economic marketplace, which rewards short-term gains over long-term ones and minimizes short-term costs at the expense of increasing long-term ones.

(Hat tip: Why Evolution is True)

"Evolving English" Exhibition

15 November 2010

For those of you in or visiting London, the British Library has an exhibition on Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices. It runs from now until 3 April 2011.

Addition:

Linguist David Crystal talks about the Undley Bracteate, a coin that bears the oldest known example of English. The runic inscription contains the words gægogæ mægæ medu, which means [something] reward for the kinsman. The meaning of the first word is not known.

There’s a short article here.

(Hat tip: Languagehat and A Way With Words)

Improving English?

12 November 2010

Jonathan Keats, the jargon columnist for Wired, penned this the other day in a New York Times blog. I’ve never read Mr. Keats, but the post makes me question his linguistic credentials. He makes some fundamental errors about the nature of language. But the Johnson blog at the Economist beat me to the criticism in a two part post here and here.

Stunning Editorial Incompetence

7 November 2010

What happens when you steal a medieval recipe for apple pie from a web site and publish it in a magazine and on Facebook, and then when the original author points out the theft you send her a snarky email?

The results are not pretty.

That’s exactly what Cook’s Source did. The magazine, which evidently is distributed for free in print and on Facebook, but accepts advertisements and does generate income, lifted an article and recipe by Monica Gaudio on medieval apple pies from the Gode Cookery website and republished it in their magazine and Facebook page.

When Ms. Gaudio discovered the theft, she contacted the magazine and after an exchange of emails in which she determined the magazine lifted the article directly from the Gode Cookery website, and not from some free database of recipes, and asked that a $130 donation be made to the Columbia School of Journalism in lieu of payment for the article, Ms. Gaudio received this reply from Cook’s Source editor Judith Briggs:

“Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was “my bad” indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things.
But honestly Monica, the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me… ALWAYS for free!”

See Ms. Gaudio’s blog here in which she discusses the violation and posts the email.

I’ll leave it to the reader to form an opinion about the arrogance displayed in this email—as well as the editorial errors in Ms. Briggs’s email. But clearly Ms. Briggs doesn’t know about copyright laws. If she did, she would know that the web is not public domain. And the editing she did? Because the article has been partially taken down from the Facebook site, I can’t determine exactly what was changed, but from accounts of others I glean that all that Cook’s Source did was modernize some of the medieval spellings. (The end of the article is still up on Facebook as of this writing, showing that Cook’s Source is as incompetent at hiding their tracks as they are at the basics of professional editing and publishing.)

But the story gets better.

Not only is the Cook’s Source Facebook page swamped with a torrent of comments by outraged Facebookers, but some began to check the sources of other Cook’s Source articles. It seems that a large number of the recipes and articles in the magazine are “lifted” straight from the web, often without any kind of attribution. (Evidently, Ms. Gaudio was lucky to have her name put on the piece when Cook’s Source reprinted it.) One enterprising individual went so far as to compile a spreadsheet of 160 of these plagiarized articles.

All this has transpired over just four days since Ms. Gaudio made mention of it on her blog. Given that many of the stolen articles are from major media outlets with scads of lawyers on their payrolls, I think that Cook’s Source is not long for this world. Good riddance. We can only hope that Ms. Briggs doesn’t work in a professional editorial capacity ever again.

(Hat tip to Pharyngula—I’d post a link, but Science Blogs seems to be down at the moment.)