Word by Word
Word by Word

Author: Kory Stamper

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2018-03-06

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 110197026X

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“We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets.” With wit and irreverence, lexicographer Kory Stamper cracks open the obsessive world of dictionary writing, from the agonizing decisions about what to define and how to do it to the knotty questions of ever-changing word usage. Filled with fun facts—for example, the first documented usage of “OMG” was in a letter to Winston Churchill—and Stamper’s own stories from the linguistic front lines (including how she became America’s foremost “irregardless” apologist, despite loathing the word), Word by Word is an endlessly entertaining look at the wonderful complexities and eccentricities of the English language.

Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English
Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English

Author: Simone E. Pfenninger

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2014-09-11

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 9027269939

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The papers in this volume aim at facilitating exchange between three fields of inquiry that are of great importance in historical linguistics: language change, (socio)linguistic research on variation, and contact linguistics. Drawing on a range of recently-developed methodological innovations, such as methods for quantifying the linguistic variation (that is a prerequisite for language change) or new corpus-based methods for investigating text-type variation, the contributors are able to trace linguistic change in different periods and contact situations, demonstrate how variation occurs, and in how far language change results out of this variation. Thus, the chapters go beyond core issues of language variation and change, focusing on the boundary between word and grammar, discourse and ideology in the history of the English language.