Don’t Believe A Word

The Surprising Truth About Language

David Shariatmadari

Having read it

★★★★☆

A book with quite a few footnotes(!) but backed up by plenty of good research and interesting facts, even though it was a bit of a tough, academic-style, read in places.

A good passage

It [language change] is universal, it is constant, it throws up extraordinary quirks and idiosyncrasies despite being governed by a range of more or less regular processes. Anyone who wants to preserve some aspect of language which appears to be changing is fighting a losing battle. Anyone who wishes people would just speak according to the norms they had drummed into them when they were growing up may as well forget about it.

A second good passage

For most of human existence, the idea of quantifying the force of gravity would have seemed absurd: things fall down because that’s just the way the world is. Only by walking on the moon does one perceive that gravity is contingent on the mass of one’s home planet. Languages are like planets.

A third good passage

Language is the fruit of both the biological evolution of social thinking and the long cultural evolution of human societies.