The Power of Babel.

If you must fly on the eastern seaboard, avoid the Philly airport at all costs. In all the times that I've flown through there over the past 6 years, I daresay I've had one flight leave on time. They have no idea how to correctly direct air traffic, and like to leave planes circling overhead for upwards of 2 hours. Add bad weather into the mix, and you could be circling for years.

Anyway, that out, onto the topic du jour.

I admit it. I'm a dork. I love linguistics. I love relating languages to each other and seeing how they develop. What I hate, however, are books on the topic that are so dry, dense and boring that they send me screaming to an issue of Vogue so that I can bask in its utter banality and look at the pretty pictures of pretty dresses. But I digress. I was in my second home the other day, and decided to pick up The Power of Babel, by John McWhorter, assistant professor of linguistics at Berkeley. The back of the book looked really promising:

In this entertaining romp through territory too often claimed by stodgy grammarians, McWhorter ranges across linguistic theory, geography, history, and pop culture to tell the fascinating story of how thousands of very different languages have evolved from a single, original source in a natural process similar to biological evolution...

It goes on, but you can find it in a bookstore yourself and read the rest. The reviews also sounded really good, the words "lively," "provocative," "fascinating," "entertaining" and "witty" used liberally.

Now, the fact that I fell asleep 6 times in the 4 hours I spent on this book probably had more to do with the fact that I was sitting outside in the nice Virginia countryside basking under a warm sun, than due to any shortcomings on the part of the book. Because the book is well-written, although personally I found it a little spastic, jumping around from subject to subject a little too quickly for me. I suppose it had to be suchly, because he uses a lot of languages in order to prove his points. Also, he uses footnotes to add personal opinion, which I found rather annoying. For example: "Yes, I am concocting these terms for our purposes. If you really want to know, I am referring to something many linguists would call degrees of anticausative prominence." (p. 124) Don't talk down to me, if I'm picking up your book it's because I want to learn something, I don't want to be treated like an idiot. Another example: "Chimpanzees have always made me extremely uncomfortable." (p. 294) I'm sorry, I know now that if I ever meet you I won't mention chimpanzees. Why? What place do such confessionals have in a book on linguistics? Don't use footnotes to add more personal interjections to a book already filled with personal anectdotes.

On the whole, for a book classified under the topics "linguistics/science" it is rather good and much more accessible than "popular" books on the same topic. But like I said, I'm a dork and I like such subjects. If you are looking for light beach reading this book is not for you.