[Lexicog] David Crystal's Genius

[Scott Nelson]

Hi, fellow word people. I wanted to salute David Crystal for his book Think on My 
Words, Exploring Shakespeare's Language (paperback, 2008) --an exquisite 
treatise on the the bard's stylistics, eloquence, vocabulary, location in and 
contribution to the development of Modern English. In a wider sense it's a scholarly 
exposition of the grammatical, phonetic/phononogical, punctuational, etc. 
development of Modern English in general, from the 1500's to present-day English. 
This historical-linguistic approach makes the book truly absorbing. 
     Crystal deals with Shakespeare and philology per se, but his cross-referential 
treatment of other writers, regional accents, and of American-British differences 
(written and spoken) I also found riveting. And his use of statistics re-proves his 
bent for being "numerically-correct."
This is not a book review, or a publisher's write-up; I just wanted to offer lead on a 
great read. His treatment of the "quantity myth" (vocabulary size), "invention myth" 
(coining quantity), "translation myth" (modernizing the text), and "style myth" 
(linguistic distinctiveness) of Shakespeare are enlightening. (David Crystal -- "...and 
insofar as there is something in the way he (Shakespeare) writes which we feel is 
distinctive, and which differentiates him from other writers, then we will continue to 
use it. But as soon as try to identify this style with reference to particular linguistic 
features, the notion starts to disintegrate.") 
     I have a subjective difference with him on his "translation myth" (modernizing), but 
his arguments about the merits of `not modernizing' are well-thought-out. After his 
Encyclopedia of The English Language, I thought that that would be the end of his 
expository masterpieces, but...... well......so much for that myth. 

Scott Nelson


      
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