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Crystal, David. (2008). Think on my words: exploring Shakespeare’s language. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Linguist David Crystal provides a thorough overview of Shakespeare’s English in this book aimed at the lay reader. Accessible and easy to read, Think On My Words is suitable for both classroom use and casual reading.

In the first chapter, Crystal debunks several common myths about Shakespeare’s contribution to the language, including:

• whether Shakespearian English is still spoken in some rural, backwoods regions
• whether or not Shakespeare used an extraordinary number of words
• whether or not Shakespeare coined an extraordinary number of words
• whether his works need to be “translated” to be understood by a modern reader
• whether or not he had a distinctive style.

The next chapter addresses the early manuscripts and folios, fundamental to any scholarly understanding of his works and language. Subsequent chapters address Shakespeare’s writing and spelling, punctuation, phonology and pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and conversational styles and meter.

Crystal is one of the most prolific writers on linguistics publishing today and his special gift is making the subject easily understandable to the lay reader and beginning student. His research is top-notch and his prose is fun to read. This is an excellent book for anyone who wants to understand the basics of Shakespearian language.

The Oxford English Dictionary has released its quarterly update for this Spring and it’s different than past updates. To date, the updates for the new, third edition have proceeded alphabetically starting with the letter M. By that schedule, this update should have covered from quits to somewhere in the letter R. But instead, this time around the editors chose to update selected words from throughout the alphabet, plus the words that surround these selections. These selections include American, and, climate, compute, fuck, gay, genetics, and love. The words were selected because they have undergone significant change since they were last revised, with additional meanings and forms, or because they have complex semantic, syntactic, or etymological issues that need new explication.

Next quarter will pick up with quits and each subsequent quarter will alternate between an alphabetical range and an updating of select words. This will allow the editors more flexibility in updating those words that are seeing rapid change in modern English and will make the OED a more useful reference.

Editor John Simpson’s complete explanation of the update can be found here.

Today is February 29th, a day that appears on the calendar once every four years (or close enough). 2008 is a leap year.

The necessity for adding a day to the calendar every four years is due to the fact that the Earth’s orbit of the sun is not exactly 365 days; it’s closer to 365.25 days. Therefore, about every four years we add one day to the calendar to keep the seasons aligned with the calendar. (For an excellent technical discussion--it’s not this simple--see Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog entries on the subject here and here.)

But we’re concerned with the word here. The use of leap to denote calendrical shifts like this dates to Old English, c.993 to be more exact. It appears in AElfric’s De Temporibus Anni. AElfric of Eynsham was a Benedictine monk who is probably the chief prose stylist of the late Old English period. De Temporibus Anni is his attempt to provide monks and priests with a text on astronomy and the calendar that they could use in the education of themselves and the laity and in combating superstition and myth. AElfric wrote in reference to the moon (which needs a leap day added to its orbit of the earth about every 19 years):

se dæg is gehâten Saltus lune • þæt is ðæs monan hlyp
(the day is called Saltus lune, that is the leap of the moon)

The leap comes from the idea that the calendar jumps and does not proceed in an orderly fashion.

The term leap year isn’t cited in English until 1387, when it appears in John de Trevisa’s translation of Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden:

That tyme Iulius amended the kalender, and fonde the cause of the lepe yere.
(That time Julius amended the calendar and established the cause of the leap year.)

While the term leap year isn’t recorded until the Middle English period, it probably was in use in Old English. The term hlaup-ár, or leap year, is recorded in Old Norse and most Norse calendrical terms were borrowed from Old English. So it seems likely that Norse acquired this one from Old English too.

(Source: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition)

The American Dialect Society has selected subprime as its Word of the Year for 2007. You can see the whole list here.

Cancer, both the disease and the astronomical constellation, derive from the Latin cancer or cancrum, meaning crab. The astrological sign, of course, is said to resemble a crab and the disease was so named by the ancient Greek physician Galen (129-200 A.D.) who noted the similarity between a certain type of tumor with a crab as well—the swollen veins around the tumor resembling the legs of a crab.

Old English adopted cancer directly from Latin and used it for a variety of spreading sores and ulcers. This early sense survives in the modern word canker. From c.1000 in a manuscript called Læce Boc (Leech Book), collected in Oswald Cockayne’s Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England, Vol. II, 1865:

Gemeng wið þam dustum, clæm on ðone cancer.
(Mix with the dust, smear on the cancer.)