I can give a hearty crabwalk.com thumbs up — er, pouces vers le haut — to The Story of French, a surprisingly enthralling book about the history of the language. (Okay, it wasn’t surprising. I’m a geek.) Really interesting stuff about the language’s development out of Latin and various local tongues, its expansion and diffusion through the colonial era (first in the Americas and, later, in Africa and Asia), and the tension between purists and realists that defines the modern face of the language. Sort of the classic descriptive-grammarian-vs.-prescriptive-grammarian food fight. writ large. I really, really dug it.
Plus, it taught me for the first time about verlan, the bizarre French version of Pig Latin.
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14 August | 10:48 | Kevin Lawver
The Meaning of Everything about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary has a really good intro into the beginnings of English, which I thought was fantastic. Can't wait to check this one out!
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Joshua Benton is the director of the Nieman Digital Journalism Project at Harvard University, among other things. Before that, he was a staff writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News. (More.)
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