Michael Quinion has a review of a book, Damp Squid: the English Language Laid Bare by Jeremy Butterfield, which sounds interesting (link).
quote:
"A word," said Humpty Dumpty to Alice, "means just what I choose it to mean" and went on to assert dogmatically, "The question is which is to be master." Is the language to rule us or we it?
This goes to the heart of modern dictionary-making. Their editors feel, almost to a man or woman, that language is what language does and that if people at large choose to join the fragile old egg in believing that glory means "a nice knock-down argument", then the word means just that, "neither more nor less", as Humpty Dumpty peremptorily told Alice. This permissive approach (descriptive in lexicographic jargon, as opposed to a prescriptive one), by which dictionaries record usage without claiming authority, still saddens some people.
[...]
It's magical what a skilled researcher can pull out of this conglomeration. One quarter of all that we write, on average, is made up of just ten words: the, be, to, and, of, a, in, that, have, I; it requires only another 90 words to cover half of our writing. (Strictly, as Butterfield is careful to explain, we should replace word by lemma, the term for the version of the word that appears at the head of an entry in a dictionary and which stands in for all the varied forms that it can take; for example, drive in corpus discussions implies also the other forms of the verb — drives, driving, drove, and driven.)
Sounds wonderful, z. I can't wait to buy it. I love the question of "Is the language to rule us or we it?" That's what this board has been about.
Speaking of good books, my husband recently bought me an excellent biography of Florence Nightingale, by Mark Bostridge. I highly recommend it. I've already cited parts of it in a book chapter I wrote about regulating nursing. Nightingale was against regulation, thinking that nurses should self regulate. In these days of fraudulent nurses and egregious errors, we need mandated regulation. However, for her day, she was probably right. The problem with regulation is that it can become a huge power play. [Sorry to get off subject.]
