What's In A Word? Mario Pei.

What's In A Word?
Mario Pei
New York: Hawthorn Books
1968

Why read it? Many people love to read about words. They play daily word games in the newspaper. The stories of words and of the English language are fascinating. And books on words are just plain fun to read. Pei gives the reader a basic course in the history of the English language. He also deals with some fundamental issues: the nature of language, speech vs. writing and the role of grammar in learning language. Fascinating.

Some sample ideas from the book:
"We know that English is basically a Germanic tongue, blending together the language of the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavian of the Danes who settled in the north of England; that upon this Germanic framework there is superimposed a romance vocabulary brought in by the French-speaking Normans; and that from the early Renaissance to the present, thousands of words have been added, lifted bodily from the Latin and Greek lexicons for purposes of literature, religion, science, technology, business and politics. We know that English has borrowed from every language under the sun."

"The speech feature of the human being lies not so much in his ability to produce sounds as in his mental capacity to link the sounds with meanings which are accepted by other human beings so that there is a real transfer of thought from one mind to another." "Today, there are in existence approximately three thousand separate spoken tongues. Some, like English and Chinese, have hundreds of millions of speakers. Others are spoken by only a few thousand or even a few hundred speakers, like many of the native tongues of the North American Indians."

"The written language has aesthetic as well as practical functions. Can one get from a recording or even from a play spoken on the stage, precisely the same values he gets from reading a play? In the written language, there is the possibility of slowing down or speeding up to suit yourself. If there is a passage that particularly strikes you, that you really want to sink in, you may read it word by word; if it is not particularly important, you may skim over it. This cannot quite be done with a phonograph recording and even less with a live voice. To a certain extent it is still true that 'words fly away, but writing remains.' "

Quote: "But there is a deeper reason for preferring the cultivated language.... The same word...will carry the same meaning to all who use it.... This community of meaning leads to a community of understanding and a better possibility of effective collaboration."

Quote: "It is an interesting fact that the critics of prescriptive grammar are its most faithful followers. They may advocate extending equality to substandard usages in theory, but they actively discrimiate agianst them in practice."

Quote: Every word tells a story...."