Topic and Focus: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives on Meaning and Intonation Book

Whoever had the chutzpah to say this is "Readable" is a criminal and belongs in jail. Interesting? Yes! But also a tremendously dry read. I might be the wrong audience, but it takes a lot of effort to tease out at the end of a chapter 'and your conclusion is...?'

It's a patently huge survey of gender in English, from the codifying of gendered nouns to gendered connotations and denotations. It's incredibly well-researched. And there's some really fascinating examples given -- I wasn't aware that bomb makers referred to successful bombs as "boys" and failed bombs as "girls," or that "oh boy" might be a lingering reference to the devil. Heck, I wouldn't mind reading some of the Old English text examples all day. For every interesting detail, though, there's a stack of quotes, technical terms that make my eyes bleed, and winding complex arguments that leave me none the wiser.

It feels like this book is a big accomplishment, but I'm just happy it's over. She makes a lot of good points (the evolution of gender in words is complex, and a word's gendered history isn't always clear cut). Maybe her most interesting point she brings up is now that English is so standardized now and we have ready access to how it's codified, its growth and history is under new and powerful forces (dictionaries in an of themselves are a force on the meaning of words). I don't know if her final chapter on how to approach reform really provides anything clear cut, but there sure is a lot of food for thought.