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A review by ederwin
Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare by Jeremy Butterfield
4.0
I read lots of books on language, so I keep seeing the same tired old examples brought out to illustrate language change. This one, though, is written for a British audience, so while the ideas were not new to me, the examples often were. ("Damp Squi(b/d)" for example, must be a more common expression there than here!)
The main point of this book is to introduce to a wide audience the idea of using a digital corpus to examine how language is actually used in real life, rather than relying on examples found by experts.
A hard-core prescriptivist may not like the focus on "actual" rather than "correct" usage, but may still enjoy the introduction to using a corpus to explore usage changes.
The author talks a lot about how large the particular corpus he used was. Sure, it was big, but, they are growing all the time. Google's n-gram is the current size champ, and is available for anyone to explore. (I just used it now to see whether the spelling "alot" is on the rise or not. I like it better than the "correct" spelling. But n-gram shows that the use of that spelling is falling-off after a peak in the 1980s.)
The main point of this book is to introduce to a wide audience the idea of using a digital corpus to examine how language is actually used in real life, rather than relying on examples found by experts.
A hard-core prescriptivist may not like the focus on "actual" rather than "correct" usage, but may still enjoy the introduction to using a corpus to explore usage changes.
The author talks a lot about how large the particular corpus he used was. Sure, it was big, but, they are growing all the time. Google's n-gram is the current size champ, and is available for anyone to explore. (I just used it now to see whether the spelling "alot" is on the rise or not. I like it better than the "correct" spelling. But n-gram shows that the use of that spelling is falling-off after a peak in the 1980s.)