Reading Ben Yagoda‘s latest book is like having a good friend analyze every word that comes out of your mouth. But it’s not a book about Grammar Rules and Policies. I was relieved to find this sentence in the first dozen pages: “Ultimately, the issue of correctness just isn’t very interesting.”
When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech for Better and/or Worse is more of a progress report on our English language. Each chapter covers a part of speech: Adjective, Adverb, Article, Conjunction, Interjection, Noun, Preposition, Pronoun, Verb. Yagoda spends an enjoyable 30 pages on just a, an, and the. I think of it as sort of reverse dissection, where the language becomes more alive as you pick at it.
Yagoda is not a real stickler for rules, per se, but certainly has a strong sense of taste. More than that, he shows a real appreciation for how we actually use our words. He pulls from a number of resources: famous authors, The New Yorker (particularly the Harold Ross era), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Bible, sports television, a variety of dictionaries & style guides both old and new, popular music, advertising, film, etc. I love the variety of research material. One chapter begins, “Any unified theory of interjections—the words that, all by themselves, express reactions or emotions or serve other purposes in discourse—would have to start, like much else, with The Simpsons.”
Some miscellaneous trivia I enjoyed:
- The “&” symbol comes from the ligature of letters e and t in the Latin word “et” (“and”). That’s not a huge surprise. But as recently as the 1800s, & was also the 27th letter of the alphabet!
- The TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer coined at least 55 –age words, such as “agreeage, kissage, and weirdage.” Who knew there was one source for all that appendagage?
- Quoting some good advice from C.S. Lewis: “Keep a strict eye on eulogistic & dyslogistic adjectives—they should diagnose (not merely blame) & distinguish (not merely praise).”
- The word ye comes from a misprinting of the word ?æe. The þ character is called thorn, and used for th sounds. Back in the day, when printers typically didn’t always have the sorts for every symbol, “it was usually replaced by putting the letters t and h together, but sometimes y was used because it was felt to look similar.”
When schoolchildren recited their ABCs, they concluded with the words “and, per se [i.e., by itself], ‘and’.” This eventually became corrupted to “ampersand.”
Great book. I’ve really had fantastic luck with my recent readings.
Mark Larson 