- 226 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
About this book
What do words like unkindness, haggard, asparagus, jizz, and the singular they have to do with birds? Quite a lot, actually. From Old English roots and Shakespearean idioms to Victorian slang and modern online lingo, Birding English charts a dynamic course through English's past, present, and future by admiring the plumage of falcons, the songs of sparrows, and the flight of ducks. With each of his fifty mini essays, Jeremy Withers uses birds as a point of entry into a key moment in the development of English: its origins in the Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic languages, the influence of writers like Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, the creation of English's first dictionaries and grammar books, and the arrival of rhyming slang and portmanteaus. Ideal for word nerds and bird nerds alike, this book will enchant anyone who's ever been captivated by the song of a bird or the song of a word.
Information
Print ISBN
9781685970697
Subtopic
LanguagesTable of contents
- Cover
- Series Page
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1. Graylag Goose: Proto-Indo-European
- 2. Canada Goose: Umlaut
- 3. Peregrine Falcon: Metathesis and Semantic Expansion
- 4. Great Skua: Old Norse
- 5. Mute Swan: Kennings
- 6. Killdeer: Onomatopoeia
- 7. Common Raven: The Persistence of Old English
- 8. Black-billed Cuckoo: The Norman Conquest
- 9. Gyrfalcon: More on the Norman Conquest
- 10. Golden Oriole: Geoffrey Chaucer
- 11. Black-capped Chickadee: Collective Nouns
- 12. Golden Eagle: The Inkhorn Controversy
- 13. Dodo: Renaissance Expansion
- 14. Northern Saw-whet Owl: Henry Cockeram’s English Dictionarie
- 15. European Starling: William Shakespeare
- 16. Spanish Sparrow: The Bible
- 17. Red-winged Blackbird: The History of Punctuation
- 18. White Stork: Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language
- 19. House Sparrow: Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
- 20. Eurasian Magpie: Eighteenth-Century Grammarians
- 21. Bald Eagle: Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language
- 22. Canada Jay: Indigenous Influences on American English
- 23. Common Merganser: British vs. American English
- 24. Sharp-shinned Hawk: Diminutive Suffixes
- 25. Ruddy Duck: Reduplication
- 26. Club-winged Manakin: Back-Formation
- 27. European Robin: Rhyming Slang
- 28. Bearded Reedling: Portmanteaus
- 29. Ross’s Goose: Eponyms
- 30. Northern Flicker: Standard and Nonstandard English
- 31. White-throated Sparrow: Mnemonics
- 32. Ring-necked Pheasant: The Language of Sports
- 33. Herring Gull: The Oxford English Dictionary
- 34. Toulouse Goose: Subversive Dictionaries
- 35. Common Nighthawk: Words with Hidden Connections
- 36. Cedar Waxwing: Folk Etymology
- 37. Dickcissel: Vulgar Language
- 38. Florida Scrub Jay: Insults
- 39. Domestic Chicken: More on Insults
- 40. Greater Prairie-Chicken: Lesser-Known Influential Languages
- 41. Galah: Global English
- 42. Blackburnian Warbler: African American English
- 43. Indigo Bunting: Is It English Yet?
- 44. Bermuda Petrel: Computers and the Internet
- 45. Field Sparrow: Texting
- 46. Anna’s Hummingbird: Social Media
- 47. Northern Cardinal: The Singular They
- 48. Yellow-billed Cuckoo: Sexist Language
- 49. Long-tailed Duck: Racist Language
- 50. Common Murre: The Future of English
- Acknowledgments
- Bibliographic Essay
- Index
- Series List
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Yes, you can access Birding English by Jeremy Withers in PDF and/or ePUB format. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.