A Berkeley linguistics professor with a common touch, John McWhorter successfully scales the ivy-covered walls of academe to bring linguistics to the masses. He has reached out in the past, appearing on the
Today Show,
Dateline NBC, and
National Public Radio, and publishing essays in
Newsweek and the
New York Times.
The Word on the Street provides another forum for his sometimes controversial but ultimately sane examination of the English language as it lives and breathes. Deploring the intimidating jargon and snooty 'tudes of the linguistics field, McWhorter tackles some of the major misconceptions about our nation's language, and does so in an immediately engaging and entertaining fashion.
He offers some valuable linguistic insights: that language is forever changing, that new patterns that sound "sloppy" or "incorrect" may be in fact on their way to becoming "proper," and that any language is a bundle of dialects, none of which is superior to any other. His book delves into these issues with academically rigorous logic and accessible, delightful flair. He compares the Lord's Prayer in Old English to its modern version, and looks at linguistic issues from past centuries that made the language monitors of the day swear that English was going to hell in a handbasket (such as the "barbarous custom of abbreviating words," so that a word like "rebuked" was pronounced as one syllable instead of "rebuk-èd," considered proper at the time). He discusses schoolmarm English (and the great hoax that it represents), Shakespeare (and why his plays might be more enjoyable translated into modern English), the search for a gender-neutral pronoun (and why "they" as third-person singular is "good" English), then takes on America's most controversial dialect, Black English (and why, though it is a systematic dialect and a national treasure, teaching it to black schoolchildren doesn't make sense). Extremely readable, astute, and timely, McHorter's assessment of today's American English is that literary rarity: a book that's essential to read and hard to put down. --Stephanie Gold
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