Michael's Reviews > Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English

John McWhorter has done it again! For those who love language, there is no author better to educate and entertain on all matters linguistic. In the current work, he proves that Celtic grammatical structures have given English its "meaningless do" (as in "Do you know what I mean?") and its normative progressive present tense (as in "I am writing" rather than the more usual in other Germanic languages "I write"). He, in fact, rather belabors the point in the first chapter to an extent that can only be the result of some nasty academic attacks he must have endured on this particular topic. He expands a reference in his 2003 book, Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care into a comprehensive discussion of the Viking role in simplifying English that explains many of the differences between Old and Middle English. He shows a somewhat less conservative side than he has shown in other works in his demonstration that getting fussy over grammatical errors (such as split infinitives or ending sentences with prepositions) is a futile occupation, since it is through errors that language changes and changes in language are inevitable. Finally, he takes on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and usefully corrects the more radical views that our language gives us our worldview, because our thinking is directed along narrow grooves dictated by our grammar. All of this is much more fun than I have made it sound in this brief synopsis. Try it; you'll like it.