Girls and boys in airports, they may get bored. It could be you. What do you do? You find a bookstore. There you find a book that looks interesting, and you buy it, and you will start reading it – if you can find a place to sit. The book is non-fiction, and of course it is about language.
This happened to someone I know (I, on the other hand, take the train whenever I can), and she bought the book for me, not for herself as she works in the hard sciences, and I found it under the Christmas tree. Thank you.
The book is called The Language-Lover’s Lexipedia and has the subtitle an A-Z of linguistic curiosities. The author is called Joshua Blackburn, and as all Australian blokes are called Joshua, he must be Australian. And as Australians have the (misguided) reputation of being monolingual, this must be about English, mostly. Both hunches appear to be true.
As a general linguist reader, one would hope that the author would include many languages, but this book deals with very few languages other than the languages of two of the most imperialistic world powers of the past centuries, which is the official language, beside their main languages, of only two small islands, both local in the fringes of the European Union.
Having read the book from cover to cover, I must say that the book is actually a lot of fun. From one page to the other, you are introduced to new topics and trivia about English, and about speakers of English. Did you know that the best-selling book in English was called Aristotle’s Masterpiece? Published for the first time in 1684, it was reprinted basically every year for the next two and a half century. During all these years, it was the only book providing information on “the storming of the mint” and “unlading of the freight”, but sometimes the word choice was more explicit: “Directions respecting the Act of Coition or Carnal Copulation”. There were no other books on sexual education.
OK, that is book history, not really linguistics. Much of the book relates to English and its words. There are chapters about dictionary entries for small things. A ‘zarf’ is the protective sleeve on a takeaway coffee cup. A chapter about Pizza Lingo: an ‘avalanche’ refers to toppings sliding off a freshly baked pizza. There is a chapter about word records, where we learn that scraunched and strenghted are the longest monosyllabic words – in English of course, and that is only from a phonological perspective. It also lists 20 languages with only one speaker left. People who have actually tried to learn other non-European languages, will be surprised to learn that Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese and Korean are the “hardest languages to learn”. It seems that the judges of the degree of difficulty are all people who (1) wanted to learn a language with at least 80 million speakers and (2) with a completely different writing system (3) with no or very few borrowings from English. These five languages are all in the top 20 of the world, so they cannot be that difficult to learn, as half of the Earth’s population speaks them.
How much is the most words that have been written on a postage stamp? 2,024. How can you make 392 points in scrabble with just one word? It was the word caziques, I guess crossing a few coloured fields at some scrabble tournament. An ‘interrobang’ is a combination of a question mark and an exclamation mark. Florida is the state that has banned most books: 5,107. Do you know what a ‘turbo-encabulator’ is? It is time that you learn. On a base of pre-fabulated amulite, you operate nofer trunnions, but do not forget to reduce side fumblings via its ambifacient lunar waneshaft. In the book you can learn what you can do with technobabble.
Not only words, also a few people are highlighted in the book, mostly forgotten women or criminal lexicographers. William Minor submitted 62,720 entries for the Oxford English Dictionary while he was in prison for murder and mental illness. James Hardy Vaux was a thief, fraud and forger, perhaps the only one forcibly transported from Great Britain to Australia as a convict and a kind of con-language artist: he wrote a comprehensive dictionary of his own semi-fictional language. Shakespeare was not the person who coined most words in the English language. The Simpsons TV-show created more. Hester Salusbury or Hester Thrale or Hester Piozzi (1741-1821) raised 12 children and wrote several lexicographic and other books, but she is mostly remembered as the illegitimate partner (in several senses) of Samuel ‘Dictionary’ Johnson.
Some of the other topics in the book: bingo calls, words for breasts, creative names for businesses (Bruce Springclean, British Hairways, Suck Cess), words that changed meanings radically (a ‘clue’ was a ball of yarn, ‘nice’ was a simple or foolish person), Charles Dickens characters (Anne Chickenstalker, William Why), the Cherokee syllabary, a study of nouns ending in -cide like xenicide, meaning the killing of an alien species. These are just some of the topics listed for the letters A-C.
It is a really funny book with lots of unnecessary knowledge. Good for laughs every day for a month. Well done, Joshua Whitebake. Worth rereading. I understand that he also wrote a book called League of the Lexicon.
The Language-lovers Lexipedia. An A-Z of linguistic curiosities.
By Joshua Blackburn. 2025.
London: Bloomsbury. GBP 14,99.
Peter Bakker loves languages, but least of them the English language. He studies languages for a living, he writes about them and talks about them to young and old people who want to listen to him, some of them being students of Linguistics at Aarhus University.
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