Customer Reviews

Watching My Language: Adventures in the Word Trade

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This is simply a collection of articles written by William Safire, whose political opinions I don't read or follow. The purpose is to describe current usage, as Safire see it, and more frequently, to go into the origins of current usage. Occasionally he takes the prescriptive angle, and argues the way words should be used. There are many times that I disagree on his definition of the sense of a phrase, or the origin of another. The dustcover promises to answer "Why is Ukraine no longer the Ukraine?" but Ukraine is not in the index, nor does the column (on pg. 7) really answer why. Slavic languages, including Russian and Ukrainian don't have articles. "Ukraine" and "The Ukraine" are the same. The distinction is in English.

The added touch of reader letters adds significantly to the value of the book, augmenting, and correcting the original columns. In particular, I have a new appreciation for the impact Yiddish has had on the English language and metaphors, particularly in New York.

While interesting, the book is seriously outdated, relying on columns from the early 1990s, which makes the book of limited interest to those unfamiliar with the utterances of a decade ago.