From Skedaddle to Selfie: Words of the Generation by Allan Metcalf
| From Skedaddle to Selfie: Words of the Generation by Allan Metcalf | |
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| Category: Trivia | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: A very interesting book, that might be a tiny bit low on the changing words of American English but puts those changes in firm, sociological context. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 232 | Date: January 2016 |
| Publisher: OUP USA | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 9780199927128 | |
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I have to go a roundabout way to introducing this book, so bear with me. It stems partly from dictionaries and the etymology of the language we use, but more so if anything from a different couple of books, and their ideas of generations. The authors of those posited the idea that all those archetypical generations – the Baby Boomers, the Millennials, and those before, in between and since – have their own cyclical pattern, and the history of humanity has been and will be formed by the interplay of just four different kinds, running (with only one exception) in regular order. I don't really hold much store by that, and I certainly didn't know we'd started one since the Millennials – who the heck decides such things, for one? Somebody must have put out an order, as someone here says of something else. But in the same way as generations get defined by collective persons unknown, so do words – and those words are certainly a clue to what was important, predominant and of course spoken in each decade.
Each time, therefore, gets the words it deserves, from the unalienable text of the USA's founding fathers, the skedaddling of their Civil War soldiers (at least they weren't military slackers) to the swell later words, such as swell itself. The faster-moving the generational change, so the faster the word use changes, as evidenced in later chapters that survey things that are generally technical in origin – the selfie, the geek, the LOL.
The thing is, that however readable the book may be – flowing through quite regularly and very well from one section of a chapter to another, and from one word to another – the picture is not complete at times. Take music – forever destined to define generations and their differences, and a subject that occurs quite often here. We go from the surprise that jazz was a baseball reference before it meandered to the music halls, but we then get swing and so on to rhythm and blues and rock and roll, but there's more to it than that. F Scott Fitzgerald here mentions jungle music (and not in the Goldie definition) and there clearly is a different book that would track these passing histories more fully than we get here. It's as if nobody ever made the mistake of thinking LOL was for 'lots of love', an important error that should have been given space.
Certainly some of the entries here seem to have too many references, and instances of use, to provide that full picture I sought. Only a couple of words apply to each of the first few generations, and the selection of words is obviously open to the opinion that they're chosen to provide an easy fit to the author's generational divide rule. The book is also fully US-centric; the ancient four-lettered F-word's entry here never touching on Reg Grundy and the Sex Pistols, but, er, one bloke and a notepad.
Still, what makes this book stand out is the sociology included in the look at these words. It must be one of the few places where you can trace the young from being, er, young, to adolescent, and from there to teenaged, and what they do from petting, to hooking up, to sexting. The approach of the book, then, to show that it's not only prescriptive, chunky dictionaries that define our language, but the actual use of it on the street, and also that the words in turn define us the speakers/writers/texters in turn, is a novel one. I'm left with the impression a better book on the subject could be had, but this is good for now, and the subject is actually a more universally interesting one, of much more general appeal than the sociology of words would at first appear to hold.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
For a straighter look at the etymology and how modern words just purloin older ones, you might enjoy New Words for Old: Recycling Our Language for the Modern World by Caroline Taggart. How words from diverse corners of our tongue actually connect in the mists of time is explored by Words of a Feather by Graeme Donald. You might also appreciate There Are Tittles in This Title: The Weird World of Words by Mitchell Symons.
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You can read more book reviews or buy From Skedaddle to Selfie: Words of the Generation by Allan Metcalf at Amazon.com.
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