A Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: Académie Française, spelling wobbles, dictionary writers, Old English, American English, Old French (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Nice choice of words" --Newsweek, 13 December 2008

"This book will be fascinating to those who would really like to find out how the English language is behaving. Clearly written and informative, it is a lively guide to that most creative and challenging language, English" --Alexander McCall Smith

"absorbing... lively...you will find something of interest on every page" --English Teaching Professional, 1 January 2009

"definitive guide to the evolution of English" --Scottish Daily Mail, 3 November 2008 --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Description

When James Murray compiled the OED in the 19th century, he used a small army of volunteers--and thousands upon thousands of paper slips--to track down the English language. Today, linguists use massive computer power--including the world's largest language databank, the Oxford Corpus, which contains more than two billion words--to determine for the first time definitively how the English language is used.
From evidence contained in the gargantuan Oxford Corpus, Jeremy Butterfield here uncovers a wealth of fascinating facts about the English language. Where does our vocabulary come from? How do word meanings change? How is our language really being used? This entertaining book has the up-to-date and authoritative answers to all the key questions about our language. Butterfield takes a thorough look at the English language and exposes its peculiarities and penchants, its development and difficulties, revealing exactly how it operates. We learn, for instance, that we use language in chunks of words--as one linguist put it, "we know words by the company that they keep." For instance, the word quintessentially is joined half the time with a nationality--something is "quintessentially American" or "quintessentially British." Likewise, in comparing eccentric with quirky, the Corpus reveals that eccentric almost always appears in reference to people, as an "eccentric uncle," while quirky usually refers to the actions of people, as in "quirky behavior." Using such observations, Butterfield explains how dictionary makers decide which words to include, how they find definitions, and how the Corpus influences the process.
Covering all areas of English, from spelling and idioms to the future of English, and with entertaining examples and useful charts throughout, this compelling and lively book will delight word lovers everywhere.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1 edition (December 13, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0199239061
• ISBN-13: 978-0199239061
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #530,050 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a Fascinating and Entertaining Book, November 25, 2008

By	Paul Hendley (Greensboro, NC USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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As a scientist, and as a long-term Brit living in the States, I feel doubly qualified to comment on this volume about English by a British expert in the field.

There's been some press coverage recently about how the book lists the clichés people hate most, such as "at the end of the day", "it's not rocket science", "24/7" etc. The book looks in some depth at usages people dislike, and some historical reasons for this antipathy. But it also covers much, much more than that: primarily, exactly how and why English continually evolves, and why that is neither good nor bad: it just happens.

To be honest, while I often use dictionaries, I'd never really thought about how they are created - though, of course, "The Professor and the Madman" had touched a chord in my imagination, as it did for so many other people. Having read Damp Squid, I understand that analysing language nowadays is scientific in a way it wasn't for the OED. Rather than laying down the law about how people SHOULD use language, dictionary writers analyse how people really ARE using language, based on huge amounts of data. This book explains exactly how they do this - thanks to the Web.

While it goes into some quite technical and fascinating detail, it does so with a lightness of touch which made me want to read on. It's an appealing mixture of scholarship and wit and I assume that's why it got the glowing endorsement from Alexander McCall Smith: "This book will be fascinating to those who would really like to find out how the English language is behaving." It will make a good stocking-filler since it's an ideal Holiday season read - both browsable and satisfying. Until I read it, I had no idea that "damp squid" was what it calls an "eggcorn" - an imaginative mistake. Copies will be under the tree for some of my American friends as well as the Brits.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "A sort of human genome project for language.", February 10, 2009

By	E. Bukowsky "booklover10" (NY United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

In Jeremy Butterfield's "Damp Squid," we learn that lexicographers use "a collection of machine-readable texts known as a 'corpus'" to analyze "how words and phrases are used in authentic, natural contexts...." "Damp Squid" is a look at how the English language is evolving across the globe. Butterfield relies on the Oxford Corpus which contains over two billion words (some words appear more than once) and can be analyzed in a variety of ways, thanks to the marvels of modern computer technology.

The corpus tells us how frequently certain words appear in speech and writing, which new words have crept into English ("blog" and its offspring are worth noting), and which spelling variants have become most common. "Damp Squid" describes the English language not as it ought to be, but as it is. Which buzzwords are hot? What can we learn about words from the company they keep? What is the role of idioms, similes, and metaphors in modern English? How have the languages of other countries influenced ours? Most controversial, who decides what is correct in terms of grammar, usage, and syntax?

This book is geared for those who are interested in the history of the English language and in how computational linguists are using modern technology to keep track of its ever changing trajectory. Butterfield's use of technical language sometimes slows things down, but his playful humor spices up what could have been an extremely dull work. The author demonstrates through the use of entertaining examples that words have ever-changing personalities. Purists may turn their noses up at some of the author's findings, but "in the end, it is speakers, not dictionaries, who decide how language is used."

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting and amusing, September 14, 2009

By	Chiara Lama (Roma, RM Italy) - See all my reviews

A small little book I read on the same day it arrived from Amazon. Under the pretence of discussing the "good use" of English, the book is at the intersection of three interests of mine: the origin of words, the use of quantitative analysis to document reality and evolutionary theory as a general algorithm applicable outside biology.
The basis of Butterfield's work is a special dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary: "The aim of this Dictionary is to present in alphabetical series the words that have formed the English vocabulary from the time of the earliest records [ca. AD740] down to the present day, with all the relevant facts concerning their form, sense-history, pronunciation, and etymology. It embraces not only the standard language of literature and conversation, whether current at the moment, or obsolete, or archaic, but also the main technical vocabulary, and a large measure of dialectal usage and slang. [...] Hence we exclude all words that had become obsolete by 1150 [the end of the Old English era] ... Dialectal words and forms which occur since 1500 are not admitted, except when they continue the history of the word or sense once in general use, illustrate the history of a word, or have themselves a certain literary currency." [OED1, 1933]
The book is interesting and amusing: I recommend it.