Book Review:

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English by John McWhorter

If you’ve ever wondered why English doesn’t act like other Germanic languages, this book is for you. It’s more than just “here’s all the stuff we stole from the Norman French” but goes into why we say “do you have the time” instead of “have you the time” and why conjugating English is so simplified that well-meaning but misguided pedants will correct you if you say “if I were a rich man” instead of “if I was a rich man.”

That said, the book is pretty nerdy, and I say this as someone who majored in linguistics. It’s accessible to laypeople (I think) but it does kind of get into the weeds at parts. I got the audiobook and really enjoyed hearing the pronunciations of the different words.



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