The Prodigal Tongue Book Review

I review the Mark Abley book, The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• The
• Prodigal
• Tongue
• Book
• Review
• Dispatches
• from
• the
• Future
• of
• English
• Mark
• Abley
• language
• linguistics
• syntax
• grammar
• spelling
• punctuation
• foreign
• languages
• words

[azirk83]

"Ain't" made it to word status. My most hated word in the English language is "simplistic", because it literally means "overly simple" and thus could easily be replaced in any sentence with the word "simple".

Why do people have to go and complicate the word "simple"?

[tetsubo57]

@azirk83 Because we hat simple things? Why do flammable and inflammable mean the same thing?

[booksandquills]

I don't have any time to watch and comment now, but I'll definitely come back to this later today! For now I'll leave you with this:

"English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

--James D. Nicoll

^_^

[tetsubo57]

@booksandquills Thank you for the quote Dear. :)

[thejohnmithredux]

I taught English in China for six years.....it is now second only to Mandarin. However you can always tell the nationality of the person who taught them by the accent.....for example my students speak with an Icelandic accent.

[tetsubo57]

@thejohnmithredux That makes me smile. :)

[67kneil]

whats cool about chinese most of the words are one syllable and one word has one meaning i like it