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!

When schoolchildren recited their ABCs, they concluded with the words “and, per se [i.e., by itself], ‘and’.” This eventually became corrupted to “ampersand.”

• 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.”

Great book. I’ve really had fantastic luck with my recent readings.

Richard Posner is an appellate judge and also a lecturer at the University of Chicago. In The Little Book of Plagiarism gives a quick 100-page tour of the historical and legal aspects of an issue that was more complicated than I thought: plagiarism. Coming from the legal world, there’s plenty of critical wordplay here, defining and refining what exactly plagiarism is and how it relates to copyright infringement, in particular.
The definition that Posner works towards in the first half of the book is most simply described as “fraudulent copying,” which he supposes isn’t always a legal misstep (or shouldn’t always be, anyway). But it’s certainly a grievous ethical lapse. One interesting aspect of plagiarism that I hadn’t thought about is trying to suss out exactly who the “victim” is. With copyright violations, the victim is simply the author whose words were stolen and who lost recognition for or control their work. With plagiarism, the works of competing, legitimate authors are put at a disadvantage, and the reader is also misled. The plagiarist gets an unfair leg up on the competition and fools the audience.

A couple other items of note are Posner’s tangential comments on universities and scholarship: “Scholars are self-selected into an activity that requires them to write, although not to write well (which means, however, that good writing is not highly valued in most scholarly fields).” Just like any other humans, it’s plausible that some professors don’t particularly worry about writing really, really well. I hadn’t thought about that before, though I’ve certainly read my share of bad scholarly writing. (And written it as well, I’m sure… but I tried).

History offers us a few obvious examples of flagrant, unapologetic borrowers: Shakespeare, Martin Luther King Jr., T.S. Eliot, etc. Posner’s take on the issue: “We need to distinguish between “originality” and “creativity,” stripping the former of the normative overtones that rightly attend the latter.” The source material may be old, but it’s what you can do with it that counts. There’s an object lesson here, I think. One that relieves a bit of the creative’s burden. You don’t have to be the first, just do it well.