Talk on the Wild Side: The Untameable Nature of Language

"I love learning languages. Lane Greene, who is the Johnson language columnist at the Economist , is one of my favourite linguists. He speaks umpteen languages and is eerily convincing, even in languages of which he knows only a sentence or two. But I’ve never studied linguistics or thought about language as a whole. This book is an entertaining introduction to the central dilemma: on the one hand, we think its bad to spell things wrong alot and put apostrophe’s where they don’t belong. On the other hand, language is constantly changing and evolving as a response to how people actually use it. At what point should a mistake become accepted as common usage? And who makes the decisions about what’s allowed and what isn’t? This book is a lot of fun—with examples from the Sherlock Holmes TV series and Donald Trump speeches. Not only will you have a comeback when someone tries to correct your grammar, but you’ll also find out lots of interesting facts about words along the way. For example, did you know that “silly” once meant “holy”?"