Such a crush on John McWhorter. This is highly entertaining whether or not you've studied the subject. ( )

Linguist John McWhorter talks about the process of language change in general, and about the changes that English, in particular, has been through and continues to go through, and why that's normal and inevitable and nothing to panic over, and also kind of cool and interesting. I don't know that there was a whole lot here that was entirely new to me, if only because I regularly listen to his podcast, but McWhorter's writing is always fun to read. (Well, mostly. Even his weird sense of humor and tendency to come up with offbeat examples to illustrate the things he's talking about doesn't quite save an entire chapter on vowel shifts from making my eyes glaze over a little. But, really, you can't not talk about vowel shifts.)

And I do think it's an important and useful thing, the attempt that books like this make to bring a linguist's perspective to ordinary people, encouraging them to replace, or at least temper, the natural tendency to get all judgy and reactionary about language change with a genuine understanding of change as a fundamental part of what language does. Or possibly even what language is.

Although I will admit that even now, I still can't help but feel a bit annoyed at the use of "literally" as simply another intensifier. Just because, despite McWhorter's best attempts to reassure me otherwise, some part of my brain remains stubbornly convinced that one day I will use it to mean "not figuratively" -- because there is no other good word to use for that! -- and no one will understand what I mean. I'm working on chilling out about that, though. I really am. Because it's very clear to me at this point that if I never used a word in a way that hasn't been decried by someone, sometime, as a linguistic degeneracy of a type guaranteed to reduce us all to incomprehensibility, I'd never be able to say anything at all. ( )

Hugely entertaining, clever, and informative. If the modern use of "literally" gets under your skin and upspeak grates on you, this book just might change your mind. Either that or it'll drive you nuts. It's full of fascinating little factoids like how once upon a time "silly" meant "blessed," and Jonathan Swift got mighty mad when english speakers stopped pronouncing the "e" in the past tense in words like "blessed," and how many languages worldwide use their version of "like" as a speech marker (as in the often-deplored usage a la "And then he was like, 'I can't go'").

I listened to the audiobook, and I recommend that. So much of what he writes depends on pronunciation and accent, and it comes through very clearly when spoken aloud (plus he was a really great narrator). ( )

Super accessible for those who know little about linguistics and/or the history of the English language but love learning more about these topics. Recommended. ( )

Time changes things. The color of your hair and the tautness of your skin. Clothing styles. Moral standards. Even rivers and mountain ranges. Yet one of the most difficult changes to accept is that relating to the language we speak everyday. Whatever our political preferences, we tend to be conservative when it comes to language.

Columbia Professor John McWhorter makes the case in “Words on the Move (2016) that such change is inevitable, no matter how valiantly defenders of the language fight against it. Yet even those defenders of the language don’t want to go back to the English spoken by Chaucer. Rather they want to preserve the English they learned in school as children. Never mind that in the years since they have helped change the language by adopting teen slang in their youth, by using new words that came with new technology and by accepting cultural changes, such as using the pronoun they instead of he to refer to a person of either sex.

Language changes in a variety of ways. New words come into the language all the time, while others words drop out from lack of use. The meaning of words change. Pronunciation changes. Grammar changes. The people who make dictionaries will always have a job because their work, like that of a dish washer in a restaurant or a mortician, never ends.

McWhorter writes in an engaging, witty style, which is fortunate for him because much of what he says is bound to irritate some, if not most, readers. He is tolerant, for example, of those who use the word literally when they mean figuratively. Like other words that once represented truth, such as actually and really, literally now means something less than swear-on-the-Bible truth.

Phrases such as “you know” and “and stuff,” and even the word like, used by young people as a stand-in for the word said, are all acceptable to McWhorter. To him they are just natural, even sensible, changes in the way English is spoken. He argues that "casual speech full of likes is not, in truth, tentative or messy, but empathic and polite."

The way English is written changes, as well, but much more slowly. The fact that written language changes more slowly than spoken language explains, McWhorter says, why the spelling of English words seems so screwy. "Speech moved on; spelling stayed put," he writes. Often words are spelled the way they were once pronounced, not the way they are pronounced today.

If you are someone who still owns a dictionary in book form, it is out of date. Even if you just bought it new yesterday. ( )