"Biblically speaking, the first paradise was the Garden of Eden. But linguistically speaking, it was a Persian amusement park. Or, more precisely, it was the walled park of a Persian ruler or noble, observed more than two thousand years ago by a young Greek named Xenophon." Allan A. Metcalf shows us paradise and a whole lot more in his whirlwind tour of languages that have made contributions to our own. Starting in Europe, the original home of English, he takes us around the world, country by country, language by language. We see a geyser in Iceland, take a siesta in Spain, and receive justice in Italy. In Africa we feel the warm harmarttan wind, visit an Egyptian oasis, and learn about mysterious voodoo. We travel to northern India, where we seek the elusive goat antelope called the serow; to icy Tibet, where the even more elusive yeti dwells unseen among the rocks; to Tahiti, where we get a tattoo; to Samoa, where we are shown how to cover it up with a lavalava. We encounter buccaneers from Brazil and Paraguay, caciques from Guyana and Surinam, bunyips from Australia, and zombies from Congo. As experienced on Metcalf's tour, the English language is more wonderful and exotic than you've ever imagined -- a truly multicultural language for a multicultural world.
Allan Metcalf is OK. In fact, he's never been more OK than now, with the publication of his "OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word" by Oxford University Press. Doesn't sound right to say a person or book is merely OK? Right! and you can read all about it in the book, which was featured in a full-page review by Roy Blount Jr. in the November 21, 2010 New York Times Book Review. OK is unquestionably America's greatest word, indeed arguably (and the book argues it) America's greatest invention and most successful export. And yet it's so humble, we hardly notice it as we pepper (or salt) our communications with OK. We're going to celebrate March 23, 2011 as OK Day - the anniversary of the birth of OK in a Boston newspaper in 1839.
He's written five previous books about language, and a book about expository writing (Writing to the Point, 6th edition) that is the best such book ever - at least he thinks so, because it embodies a lucid method that is the only writing instruction that has ever improved his own writing. (It's a method invented by William J. Kerrigan years ago.)
He's a professor of English at MacMurray College in Illinois, and long ago earned a B.A. from Cornell University and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He's also executive secretary of the American Dialect Society, a national scholarly association for the study of American English, past and present.
