The Story of English: Third Revised Edition

This book provided some interesting content not available in a normal history of English, but I would not have bought the book, if I had seen it in a normal bookshop on the street. It has been quite some time since I last bought a mass-market paperback. I did not expect a non-fiction book to be a mass-market paperback: all other such books I bought were trade paperbacks. In fact, the printing is even worse than some of the old cheap fictions I bought, with many pages looking blurred.

After getting this book, I decided I need to make some calculation before I buy a book on-line next time. I will calculate:

grams-per-page = weight-in-ounces * 28.35 / pages

or

grams-per-page = weight-in-pounds * 454 / pages

I will stop if grams-per-page is less than 1. This book gets 0.82, while most of my books get a number greater than 1.2.

The authors offer great information about the history of English if you can decipher the long-winded explanations. I would not recommend this book for undergrads unless they have a grasp of historical mapping and civilizations.

How can we be expected to take a volume on the English language seriously when its first two sentences (trying to make the point that when we sent a message to the space aliens, we did it in English) read:

"On 5 September 1977, the American spacecraft Voyager One blasted off on its historic mission to Jupiter and beyond. On board, the scientists, who knew that Voyager would one day spin through distant star systems, had installed a recorded greeting from the people of the planet Earth."

The authors' point isn't even valid. The message was in English because an English-speaking country launched Voyager, not because English is a consensus language for extraterrestrial communication. Not only that, the message was not recorded by a native English speaker, but by the Austrian Nazi Kurt Waldheim. Those onboard scientists will have some explaining to do when they meet ET.