Gender, Language and Discourse Book

Pretty good, for what it was. I would never have picked up a linguistics book if it weren't on my reading list for uni, but I did quite enjoy this, because I love English. Whilst I'm MORE interested in poems and stories that take words and use them in ways that send goosebumps racing over my skin, that make my heart clench or my pulse race or my eyes fill with tears, ways that pull me into a world or a person and don't let me go, I'm also interested in the way those words work.

A couple of fun facts:

70% of English words come from other languages, mostly Latin and French. A lot of our Latin-root words are conceptual, to do with religion, learning or abstracts. By contrast, a lot of our more concrete words, relating to physical things, are Germanic in route. This is because Latin was the prestige language, used for religion, law and literature, whereas Germanic Anglo-Saxon language was used for the day-to-day.

Ever wondered why spellings are often so different to pronunciations? It's because the Romans invaded Britain and imposed their Roman alphabet on the original Celtic languages, which were not Romantic languages. So we were forced to come up with weird letter combos to represent sounds, unlike, say, Spanish, which is a Romantic language, wherein most sounds are represented by just one letter, and it's normally said the way it's spelt.

Cool, right?

This book raised an interesting question for me because it showed me that I'm a puritan and a liberal all at once when it comes to language. Why do I shrink from "reforms" such as removing apostrophes (the very notion makes me ANGRY, I HAVE STRONG FEELINGS ABOUT PUNCTUATION, OK?), and yet am very happy to use "potensh", "lol" and "whatevs" in conversation? And if anyone calls me out on my use of text speak irl (I say "irl" quite a lot), I say, "pfft! Language is fluid!"

So there's a dichotomy there. I don't have the answers.

What do you think?