Ever since Chaucer's day, when the host of the Tabard Inn in Southwark rose to welcome the Canterbury Pilgrims with a joke, the After Dinner Speech, designed, if possible, to reduce the assembled company to helpless merriment, has presented the ultimate challenge.
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Ambrose 'Bitter' Bierce was immortalised by The Devil's Dictionary. His series of satirical definitions and irreverent aphorisms first appeared from 1881 to 1886 in the columns of a provincial newspaper, impaling the sacred cows of civilised life - and much else besides - upon the spikes of his own mordant wit.
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In an engrossing narrative that opens our eyes to the extraordinary heritage of human communication, Ostler gives us five millennia of world history as seen through the ‘empires of the word’.
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From Beowulf to The Book of Common Prayer, from the Great Vowel Shift to the worldwide web, it has been a long road, full of unexpected diversions, which continues to snake into the horizon. No guide could map the journey of the English language in a more entertaining style than Robert Burchfield.
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Where does language come from? How does it evolve? Why is a 3-year-old child a grammatical genius? These are some of the questions to which Steven Pinker turns his dazzling insight and expertise.
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