Lynne Murphy

Informative without being stuffy and funny without being dismissive. I really loved Lynne Murphy's voice, it felt almost as if I was in a class with that one cool teacher. I was def surprised by the provenance of a lot of words, finding myself going "welp, that's wrong" and then remembering that I'm not a trained linguist, so maybe I don't know best pretty often. So I learned some new stuff, possibly including humility.

I must admit that I always want to spell "behavior" as "behaviour" and getting spell-checked is annoying af. I bet it's more annoying-er when it happens to British English speakers.… (mais)

Linguists are a difficult lot. As a lifelong lover of English (especially written English) and a copy editor by calling and occasional profession, I'm always drawn to books about the English language, which means that I have to bear the insults that most linguists can't resist flinging toward copy editors, whom they seem to regard as the guardians of ignorance and prejudice against the way people naturally speak. In fact, editors work for employers and not for linguists, which means we're paid to put our clients in a good light by making their text clearer and more pleasing to the average reader. Unfortunately, this often includes adhering to conventions that have no basis in linguistic analysis -- as linguists will tell you at great length.

For whatever reason, however personable and kind the most prominent linguists may be in ordinary life, they also tend to be, well, abrasive. So you've got the pugnacity of John McWhorter, the rantish bullying of Geoffrey Pullum, and the cloying condescension of Kory Stamper, whose Twitter stream is hilarious but whose book is filled with infuriating I-bet-you-didn't-know-that asides. I'm glad to say that Lynne Murphy avoids all these flaws and has written a consistently entertaining, informative, and charming book that goes way beyond the usual list of obvious differences between North American and British English. As an American living in England with an English spouse, she's perfectly equipped not to analyze that divide from a linguistic standpoint, but from the point of view of one who continually encounters surprising differences in her daily life. So we get not just a dry list of equivalent words (the boot = the trunk, ho-hum) but some very intelligent discussions of when both cultures use the same word (such as "hot dog") to mean something very subtly different. (In America, a hot dog must include a frankfurter. In the UK, it's the roll that makes a hot dog, not the meat: it can be any kind of sausage.)

You get a discussion of the impact of lexicographers such as Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster. You get a startling sub-chapter about the completely opposed philosophies about how to teach English to college students. You get endlessly amusing stories about why British complaints about "Americanization" are ill-informed and otherwise all wet. And you get some very informed speculation about the future of the English language in the UK and around the world. Surprise: it's not likely to become "more American" after all!

All that's lacking in this book is an index of terms so that one can look up a particular phrase, whether American or British. It's a real shame, because in depth and number of examples, The Prodigal Tongue has my British/American Language Dictionary (1984) all beat. Highly, highly recommended to all lovers of English throughout the world, wherever they may read it.… (mais)