David Crystal Book order

A collection of 366 witty and fascinating facts, events and stories about language, for every day of the year (with one extra for leap years).

David Crystal provides concise, accessible answers to fifty questions about English language usage. In this compact, user-friendly book, David Crystal draws on his extensive knowledge and experience to answer questions from English language teachers and learners from around the world. The book covers topics ranging from general enquiries about the language as a whole to specific points of grammar, pronunciation, orthography, vocabulary, idiom and style. The author's responses are illustrated by personal anecdotes, placed within historical and literary context and supported by research and corpus data to provide unique, authentic insights.

The vocabulary of past times, no longer used in English, is always fascinating, especially when we see how it was pilloried by the satirists of the day.Here we have Victorian high and low society, with its fashionable and unfashionable slang, its class awareness and the jargon of steam engines, motor cars and other products of the Industrial Revolution. Then as now, people had strong feelings about the flood of new words entering English. Swearing, new street names and the many borrowings from French provoked continual irritation and mockery, as did the Americanisms increasingly encountered in the British press. In this intriguing collection, David Crystal has pored through the pages of the satirical magazine, Punch, between its first issue in 1841 and the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, and extracted the articles and cartoons that poked fun at the jargon of the day, adding a commentary on the context of the times and informative glossaries. In doing so he reveals how many present-day feelings about words have their origins over a century ago.

Banter, chit-chat, gossip, natter, tete-a-tete: these are just a few of the terms for the varied ways in which we interact with one another through conversation. David Crystal explores the factors that motivate so many different kinds of talk and reveals the rules we use unconsciously, even in the most routine exchanges of everyday conversation.

How did Shakespeare's plays sound when they were originally performed? How can we know, and could the original pronunciation ever be recreated? David Crystal recounts and reflects on Shakespeare's Globe's experiment with original pronunciation.

The Story of Be does a brilliant job: it offers a language enthusiast an entertaining overview of the history of be along with social changes affecting its use, dialect features, and much more. Bookbag

The world's greatest authority on language explains the secrets and subtleties of the grammar of English. David Crystal explores its history and varieties, explains its rules and irregularities and shows how to navigate its snares and pitfalls. He gives practical guidance on how grammar is used in different ways for different purposes and in different social settings. In a series of revealing illustrations he also considers what learned and prominent people have said about English grammar over the centuries. Like its three companion volumes Making Sense will appeal to everyone interested in the English language and how to use it.

David Crystal shows how our feelings about pronunciation today have their origins in the way our Victorian predecessors thought about the subject, as revealed in the pages of the satirical magazine, 'Punch'. Richly illustrated, this is a fascinating and highly entertaining insight into our ongoing amusement and prejudice at how we speak.