By Hook or By Crook: A Journey in Search of English by David CrystalOverlook Press, 2008 (originally HarperCollins, 2007)

This book had me grinning from the preface, which quotes HV Morton (“I have gone round England like a magpie picking up any bright thing that pleased me.”) and calls this book a “linguistic travelogue” (pp xii, xiii). The first chapter continued along excitingly: I’d heard of the Welsh town with the longest place-name in the UK (Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwll-llantysiliogogogoch), but didn’t know the whole story of it: it used to be just Llanfair, or Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll (to distinguish it from the other Llanfairs across Wales)—but then when the railway came through in the 1800s, they adopted the new name as a way to encourage trains (and tourists) to stop there (p 3). As the book carries on, it’s rambling and a little scattered, and it’s full of references to British TV shows I’d never heard of (like “The Prisoner”—thank goodness for YouTube, or “The New Statesman”—YouTube to the rescue again), but I still really enjoyed it. I liked the chapter about Welshpool and border accents, the idea that because people in border towns “are exposed to two ways of speaking, they make all kinds of different choices from the array of sounds that surround them” (pp 53-54), and the chapter on Birmingham accents and the general pressure to minimize local accents for success in business, and whether this means that accents are dying out. Crystal says that accents as a whole aren’t, but some are changing, and some dialects and accents are “being replaced by new ones. The many mixed accents and new urban accents are proof of that” (p 79). It was pleasing to read about the Hay Festival, and to learn (unrelatedly) that “most of the simplified spellings that distinguish American from British English were proposed by [Noah Webster]. Color for colour. Program for programme. Traveling for travelling” (p 122). The wordplay in the 11th chapter, isograms and heterograms and lipograms and other games, is excellent, as are the bits of trivia throughout the book, like the fact that Bovril was originally called “Johnston’s Fluid Beef” (p 200). And, of course, the whole thing is full of pleasing words.