Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare
Jeremy Butterfield, "Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare"
English | ISBN: 019957409X | 2010 | 179 pages | AZW3 | 4 MB
English | ISBN: 019957409X | 2010 | 179 pages | AZW3 | 4 MB
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
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