Michael Erard - Archives

Most linguists approach language as just another kind of natural fact, like cells or rocks. Most of the intellectual action takes place in chairs, and it ends less often in triumphant discovery than in quiet revelation.

Then there’s Derek Bickerton. One of the field’s old lions, he has spent the last four decades studying pidgins and Creoles and writing a few novels on the side. A self-described macho “street linguist” for whom fieldwork is part pub crawl, Bickerton has a penchant for big ideas and a “total lack of respect for the respectable” that, judging from his new memoir, has put him at odds with bureaucrats and colleagues. “Bastard Tongues” is gossipy, vain and pugilistic — in other words, all the juicy things an academic memoir should be but too rarely is.

Read the rest of the review here. Original is here.

My review of William Safire's Safire's Political Dictionary starts like this:

Words are the most familiar part of language, because it's words we're most conscious of learning and forgetting. Only certain words, though. Your word-of-the-day calendar will never list "the" or "but." You boast about knowing French numbers, not the pronouns. What draws our fascination is the words for things, actions, properties and the other stuff of the world, not archaic prepositions.

Read the rest here. The original is here.