Sprightly history that sensibly balances the merits of standardization against the forces for freedom.
A romp through Anglo-Saxon orthography, from ninth-century monks matching letters with sounds to 21st-century spelling bees.
Journalist Wolman (A Left-Hand Turn Around the World, 2005) begins with the obvious: English spelling? A mess! He had trouble with spelling in school, he confesses, and “as a weak speller, I have some questions that need answering.” So he persuaded linguist David Crystal (By Hook or By Crook, 2008, etc.) to join him on “an orthography-themed road trip” across the English countryside. They started at Winchester’s Hyde Abbey, where King Alfred held sway and nearly introduced a more standardized English. Instead, “the French came,” so Wolman went on to the site of the Battle of Hastings, source of many subsequent spelling troubles as the conquerors brought their Gallic words along with them. He visited various places associated with Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dryden, Johnson and others who shaped English language and orthography. Later, confronting old demons from elementary school, he entered a barroom bee and did battle with decuman. Wolman writes about Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary and that mad guy who worked on the OED. He takes an informative, amusing look at some of the more determined efforts to standardize spelling, most notably the Simplified Spelling Board of Melvil Dewey, who had better luck with the Dewey Decimal System. Wolman devotes some pages to “universal languages” like Volapük and Esperanto, also including a much lesser known attempt to create a standardized language, the Mormons’ “Deseret Alphabet.” Amusement cascades in the final sections as the author describes taking a test for dyslexia, joining the protestors outside a national spelling bee and visiting the godfather of computer spellcheck. Teens and texting, he predicts, are the future of spelling, like it or not.
Sprightly history that sensibly balances the merits of standardization against the forces for freedom.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-136925-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Smithsonian/Collins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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