If you’re interested enough in the English language to be spending your time reading a review of this book, you already know everything I’d normally put in the lead paragraph: that any language changes over time; that English – far from being an exception – is a premier example; and that writers and speakers of English are exuberant inventors, promiscuous borrowers, and shameless repurposers of words. Suffice it to say, then, that Larpers and Shroomers is a testament to all of that: A study of a language in the process of becoming, and a snapshot of what it looked like at a particular moment in time.

Larpers and Shroomers is one in a short-lived series of such annual snapshots, collectively titled (after the first one) “The Language Report.” It inventories new words and expressions from the worlds of computers, advertising, politics, teenage slang, and other fertile areas – documenting their meanings and the nuances attached to them, tracing their emergence, and inventorying their inventors (if known) and early adopters. Published by Oxford University Press -- the people who brought you the Oxford English Dictionary – it’s intended (and reads) as a serious attempt to document the evolution of English. Bright is, in effect, an anthropologist loose among British (and, to a lesser extent, American) users of English: Observing and recording, building a richly detailed mosaic of observations one carefully placed fact at a time.

The serious intent of the project doesn’t, however, mean that the execution is dull. Far from it. The cover design of the book is whimsical, the writing accessible, and the humor – present throughout the short chapters – subtle but abundant. Larpers and Shroomers is neither prescriptive (like William Safire’s On Language and its many sequels), nor interpretive (like Geoffrey Nunberg’s Going Nucular), but it offers similar pleasures to readers who’re fascinating by the richness and diversity of English. If you’re in that category, give Bright a try . . . and know that there are four more volumes where this one came from. ( )