Words On Words. Quotations About Language And Languages

Cover Type: Hardcover
Book Condition: Fine
Jacket Condition: Fine
Publisher: Penguin
Publisher Place: London
Publisher Year: 2000
Edition: First Edition

Description: 592 pages. Book and Jacket appear to have hardly been read and are both in Fine condition throughout.

Publishers Description: "I hate quotations," said Emerson in his Journals. "Tell me what you know." Poor Emerson. He didnt realize how very much could be known by browsing a book of quotations. Words on Words provides a sort of crash course in the history of thought about language and languages. Sure, what you get here are just snippets--nearly 5,000 of them--but those snippets will send you back to countless original sources. The result is a sort of Bartletts for word lovers, language enthusiasts, and linguists. (As in Bartletts, a generous portion of the text--nearly half--is devoted to indexes.) Editors David Crystal and Hilary Crystal culled (and frequently corrected) quotations from elsewhere; they also read widely, gathering quotations from original sources. They were often surprised, they say in the books introduction, by which texts rendered the most quotations: the works of Laurence Sterne, for example, were "unexpectedly fruitful"; Pepyss Diary, on the other hand, "yielded next to nothing." In their reading, the editors sought, among other qualities, "succinctness and autonomy of expression." They found this with abundance in the works of Oscar Wilde, as well as in those of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Montaigne, Emerson, Samuel Johnson, Dickens, and Ambrose Bierce (his unequaled Devils Dictionary is widely quoted). The quotations have been sorted into 65 categories, focusing on such topics as language origins, usage, multilingualism, verbosity, slang, and the language of politics. One might think, given David Crystals renown as a linguist, that professional linguists might have made a strong showing here. No go. "On the whole," the Crystals say, "linguists are remarkably unquoteworthy." --Jane Steinberg

ISBN: 9780140291346