An adorable and approachable book about the history and future of language. It covers early spoken sounds, alphabets and written languages, multiple languages, made-up languages, neologisms, sign language, and does it all in an entertaining and easily understandable way. ( )

This conversational history offers many tidbits of the origin of words, how languages came to be, language families, slang, unspoken language --sign language, and so much more. I can see reading a page here and there to deepen or being a lesson on grammar ("Grammar Day is March 4th" (p.8) Who knew?), a lesson on vocabulary ("By the time you're finished high school, you'll have a vocabulary of about 20,000 words" (p. 6) I think this might inspire kids to enrich their vocabularies. And you gotta love this: Shakespeare "liked to turn nouns into verbs. He 'friended' long before Facebook. And we can thank him for 'zany,' too." ( )

Lots of interesting information, really weird pictures. ( )