A fascinating and readable account of how the English language developed. Expect more than 100 Words - while each section is ostensibly about a particular word, this is just a stalking horse. There can be a dozen or more related words explained in the section. ( )

Entertaining. Small nuggets of info on English words. ( )

I really enjoyed this book, learned the first English word and "Bill and Ted" even gotten a section under the word dude. My favorite of the 100 words was fopdoodle, fop a fool, doodle a simpleton thus fopdoodle was a fool twice. Luckily the author was only a fopdoodle once that I caught when he credited Thomas Edison for the invention of the telephone instead of Alexander G. Bell. But it's a book about words not inventions. ( )

I thoroughly enjoyed this look at the English language. David Crystal presents 100 words, each one illustrating a concept in the development and evolution of our language. He talks about borrowed words, spelling changes, suffixes becoming words, the influence of new technologies on language development. Absolutely fascinating! ( )

I'm a word nerd, so I found this book very interesting and very accessible. After very short historical explanation of how the English language came to be. "...English is a vacuum cleaner of a language, whose users suck in words from other languages whenever they encounter them." Crystal has chosen 100 words to examine and analyze, looking at their contribution the language as a whole. Each word has a brief explanation, that is humorously and thoughtfully written. Examples: roe -- 5th century -- 1st written English word, identifiable as such. It was carved on a deer bone -- naming it as from a certain species. Some other fun examples: bone-house, a word painting (kenning) from the 10th century to mean the human body. "cuckoo" -- 13th century -- a word that describes a sound (onomatopoeia) more than the creature; Watergate -- the use of a place name (toponym) as a noun or verb; strine -- a word coined for comic effect, usually playing off its pronunciation, more than its actual spelling. (e.g. "ickle, = little sly drool = slide rule). The most important word of the 20th century? "jazz." If this book doesn't help you win Jeopardy or Trivial Pursuit, nothing will. ( )