Book No. 79 of 2020
Reading has been slow going lately; I’ve been very focused on pre-election activities (ballot research, writing and updating a voting guide for other people, writing to swing state voters). This book was a nice respite from my shoring-up-democracy hobby.
Collins’ book is part memoir, part anthropological exploration of language. As both a huge linguistics geek and someone familiar with occupying a multilingual brain (and someone who recently tackled learning French) I found this a fun and illuminating book. Also Collins’ writing, in addition to being beautiful and well-crafted, is really, really funny.
I fully expected this to be a self-indulgent navel-gazing memoir (the slightly twee cover art doesn’t help) or an unabashedly American travelogue, but was pleasantly surprised at the eloquence and thoughtful vibe of the book, as well as the sheer amount of information I learned (did you know that for most of its history, America was not an English-dominant country, with many Americans speaking Dutch, German, or French as their primary language, and monolingualism didn’t set in until the WWII nationalism hit?)
Similar Reads
The linguistic deep-dive into how language serves various functions reminded me of Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet.
For more fun on linguistics and etymology: Mark Forsyth’s The Etymologicon.
I was also reminded often of David Sedaris’ writing about learning Japanese (for both the similar themes and the humor) which, IIRC, is in When You Are Engulfed in Flames (but I may very well be wrong). Also his writing about living in France, in both WYAEIF and Naked.