A marvellously entertaining book was sent to me recently by the literary editor of this paper. It's called Words on Words; it's by David and Hilary Crystal, and the publisher is Penguin.
It costs £8.99 sterling and contains over 5,000 diverting quotations from wordsmiths across the centuries. It covers aspects of language from abuse to flattery; from body language to the language of diplomacy; from grammar to dictionaries. There are 64 chapter headings in all. May I give you a sampler?
"If the choice had been left to me, I would rather have entrusted the refinement of our language, as far as it related to sound, to the judgement of the women, than of illiterate courtfops, half-witted poets, and university-boys." That was Dr Swift in his 1712 "Women like silent men. They think they're listening." That's a 1956 quote from Marcel Achard.
Slang next. Anthony Burgess was fond of it: "The word slang is vague and its etymology obscure. It suggests the slinging of odd stones or dollops of mud at the windows of the stately homes of linguistic decorum." Chesterton vigorously defended slang: "All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry." On the other hand, Robert Burchfield, the author of The English Language (1985) called slang "dustbin language".
As a lexicographer I was particularly interested in the section on dictionaries. James Sledd, in a famous 1962 essay, The Lexicographer's Uneasy Chair, said "a dictionary without quotations is like a table of contents without a book." What would he say to a dictionary without either quotations or etymologies, a chairde Gael? Richard Chenevix Trench said that "a dictionary is a historical monument, the history of a nation". Dr Johnson thought poetry was easier than lexicography: "composing a dictionary requires books and a desk: you can make a poem walking in the fields or lying a-bed."
"Gramer, the grounde of al" was Langland's verdict in Piers Plowman in the late 14th century. But George Eliot, in Middlemarch, describes a pedantic teacher as a person who "in the general wreck of society would have tried to hold her Lindley Murray above the waves". Lindley Murray was the grammar of the 1870s.
I know some very good rock journalists; I hope they will forgive this inclusion. Frank Zappa dixit: "Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read."
Language is the house of being, Martin Heidegger claimed. Buy this unique anthology. You won't regret it, I promise you.