Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare

by Jeremy Butterfield

When James Murray compiled the OED in the 19th century, he used a small army of volunteers--and thousands upon thousands of paper slips--to track down the English language. Today, linguists use massive computer power--including the world's largest language databank, the Oxford Corpus, which
contains more than two billion words--to determine for the first time definitively how the English language is used.
From evidence contained in the gargantuan Oxford Corpus, Jeremy Butterfield here uncovers a wealth of fascinating facts about the English language. Where does our vocabulary come from? How do word meanings change? How is our language really being used? This entertaining book has the up-to-date
and authoritative answers to all the key questions about our language. Butterfield takes a thorough look at the English language and exposes its peculiarities and penchants, its development and difficulties, revealing exactly how it operates. We learn, for instance, that we use language in chunks of
words--as one linguist put it, "we know words by the company that they keep." For instance, the word quintessentially is joined half the time with a nationality--something is "quintessentially American" or "quintessentially British." Likewise, in comparing eccentric with quirky , the Corpus reveals
that eccentric almost always appears in reference to people, as an "eccentric uncle," while quirky usually refers to the actions of people, as in "quirky behavior." Using such observations, Butterfield explains how dictionary makers decide which words to include, how they find definitions, and how
the Corpus influences the process.
Covering all areas of English, from spelling and idioms to the future of English, and with entertaining examples and useful charts throughout, this compelling and lively book will delight word lovers everywhere.

Genres: Nonfiction, Language, Linguistics, Reference, History, Humor, Writing

192 pages, Hardcover

First published October 30, 2008

Reviews

[S.P. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I chuckled, chortled and snorted my way through this entertainingly written book about the English language. I found the use of a large corpus to analyse how people actually use English as opposed to how (possibly other) people think English ought to be used to be interesting and enlightening.

I confess, if I knew enough about it, I would be a ‘grammar Nazi’ and would openly condemn anyone willfully abusing their epicentres and disinterested tautologies. Butterfield disagrees, and sees the language as an ever evolving body that inevitably changes over time (!). The criterion to which I would criticise this view would be the speed of the change in the modern language is much faster than which has previously occurred – with txt-spk being a prime example where language is changing faster than (perhaps) the grammarians would like.

In my view, the pure inventiveness of English is both its virtue and Achilles’ heel. It could go either way – become even more a diverse construction of prose and ideas or degenerate into a kind of newspeak of abbreviated and limited form tht cn b txtd btwn ppl of vy lmtd ideas. Eod. (IMHO).

[Maurizio Codogno · Rating 3 out of 5]

La linguistica è una materia che ha avuto un grande vantaggio dalla nascita degli elaboratori elettronici, tanto che negli anni 1960 nacque addirittura una nuova disciplina, la linguistica computazionale. Con il ventunesimo secolo la quantità di testo a disposizione di chi vuole fare delle analisi su come si evolve la lingua è incredibile: il corpus che ha dato l'idea per questo libro contiene la bellezza di due miliardi di parole (che poi sono qualche gigabyte... ma senza immagini e file audio-video vi garantisco che non sono pochi). Nel libro si racconta di come si può vedere la lingua viva e all'opera, ad esempio accorgendosi di come le forme considerate errate dai grammatici prescrittivisti stiano o no prendendo piede nella lingua di tutti i giorni, o almeno in quella scritta ancorché rilassata come quella dei blog. Tra l'altro, il titolo stesso del libro è un errore grammaticale; l'espressione "damp squib" (letteralmente "petardo umido", che non scoppia e quindi è qualcosa di inutile) non era comprensibile a molta gente che l'ha così storpiato in "damp squid" (calamaro umido).
Per un curiosone come me il libro si addentra troppo poco nei meandri della lingua inglese, sembrando a volte più che altro un'incensazione al Corpus; inoltre contiene troppe parole che mi sono del tutto ignote - il che non è così strano, se si pensa che c'è un capitolo che racconta di come lo stesso concetto si possa spesso esprimere con tre parole diverse: una anglosassone, una franco-normanna e una di origine latina o greca. Ma la lettura è stata comunque piacevole.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating study of words *as people actually use them.* Most books on language do not have the power of the Corpus behind them, which is what makes Damp Squid so special.

This book is written for a British English audience, which means that even hardcore linguaphiles like myself will be kept slightly off-balance the entire time. Even during the introductory, English-comes-from-German-and-1066-blah-blah-blah portions you won't find yourself bored (unless you've also studied British English, I guess).

The origin of the title, apparently a common phrase across the pond, isn't glossed until Chapter 6. Or an exercise in collocation--"What word most naturally comes at the end of this sentence?" isn't as dead simple for American English speakers as it would have been for Brits.

Have a very basic knowledge of Brit slang before going into this, or be willing to Google: if you don't know what a chav or a lorry is, you may be thrown a little too much off balance.

Definitely recommended for any word lovers.

[Stela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jeremy Butterfield’s Damp Squid would be nothing more than a Linguistic 101, if the disinhibited, casual approach did not make the book a funny reading for everyone, not only for would-be linguists.

The main objective of the essay is to convince grammar police and other language nerds that language is not a holy instrument to be carefully approached and used, but a live organism, forever growing and changing. Therefore, the author browses The Oxford Corpus (the 2006 edition, with over two billion words taken from contemporary English all over the world) in search of examples and statistics to illustrate it. If you didn’t know (I didn’t 😊), the Corpus (created in 1961 under the name of The Brown Corpus, which gathered then an impressive million words) is a collection of machine-readable different texts, organised in 40 domains (business, religion, sport, weblog etc.), each with its own subdomains.

Even though it is not a perfect instrument, the Corpus is a very valuable source of information about frequency of words and phrases, about their birth and productivity (like ‘blog’ that has given blogosphere, blogospheric, blogospherical, bloggerati – the big-cheese bloggers, bloggocks, blogstipation – the blogger’s block, Bloglish – based on Spanglish to describe the language of the blog), spelling variants, meanings coming into the language (like ‘anorak’ – the British equivalent of the US nerd and geek, whose ‘nerd’ meaning has put a negative trait even on the ‘garment’ meaning: ‘She was wearing tacky grey trousers and an unflattering blue anorak.’), patterns that influence spoken and written communication (ready-made metaphors and idiomatic expressions people play creatively with), neologisms etc.

The author organizes all this information in eight sections that speak about the size of the English language, the origins of the words, the causes of the spelling errors, the meanings in the context, the uses in the context, the idiomatic phrases, the definition of the grammar and the linguistic importance of the style. As I said, from a scientific point of view there is nothing new in the study for those familiar with general linguistics, even if they are not specialists (I, for example, do not pretend I am one, although I have taught several generations of students about vocabulary dynamics), therefore I will point out only some disparate facts either I did not know about or simply amused me:

• in British “there are twelve words naming a pea pod, and 34 different ways of saying ‘to throw’”, and 79 in American for a dragonfly);

• ailurophobe is a person afflicted with ailurophobia, a morbid fear of cats;

• online activity is the source of some amusing new words like cyberchondria (diagnosing yourself with a disease you’ve read about online); cobwebsite (a site that hasn’t been updated), data smog (overwhelming excess of information), doppelgoogler (someone with the same name as you that you found on internet), egosurfing (search for your own name on the web), linkrot (hyptertext links that lead nowhere), 404 (a stupid person);

• Janus words or ‘contronyms’ are words used by speech communities with a contrary meaning: bad and wicked for ‘good’, fat rewritten as phat for ‘excellent’;

• “starve” comes from the Viking verb steorfan meaning ‘to die’ that went through a narrowing process to mean today only ‘to die of hunger’;

• words’ meanings can go up or down in time: sophisticated had at first the negative connotation ‘deprived of primitive simplicity or naturalness’) and enthusiasm was used in the eighteenth century to criticize religious reformers; on the contrary, silly meant in Old English, ‘happy, blissful, fortunate’ before becoming a pejorative word, and knave went through a similar process, originally meaning simply a young boy, then a servant or somebody in a lowly social position, as opposed to a knight, and finally, a rogue;

• we are often quoting Shakespeare without knowing it, when we use phrases like ‘cold comfort’ (King John), ‘wild goose chase’ (Romeo and Juliet), ‘tower of strength’ (Richard III), ‘sorry sight’ (Macbeth), ‘cruel to be kind’,‘to the manner born’ (Hamlet);

• ‘to the manner born’ is subject either to folk etymology, ‘to the manor born’ or word-playing: ‘to the manure born’ (about one who loves horses);

Someone criticizing a restaurant writes: ‘The lunch menu is laminated, which is difficult to bear if you are to the menu born like me.’

• the title itself comes from the Shakespearian expression ‘damp squib’, deformed by folk etymology, because the word ‘squib’(= firework) is not used outside the idiom anymore, and in the speaker’s mind ‘squid’ intensifies the idea of dampness. The same for ‘at one fell swoop’:

The obsolete adjective fell (= ‘cruel, ruthless’) puzzles people, so they reinterpret it. Bird imagery, as we saw earlier, is very common in English, so it is not surprising to find in one fowl swoop.

• glamour is a corruption of grammar, and it was used in Scotland to mean a magic spell. The connection between the two was created because grammar was perceived as the preserve of those who had Latin, and their skills were assumed to include the occult. The modern meaning of ‘attractiveness’ for glamour is a mid-twentieth century shift;

• there are some “folk commandments of English usage (…): thou shalt not end a sentence with a preposition; thou shalt use shall rather than will with ‘I’; thou shalt not say disinterested when thou meanest ‘not interested’; thou mayest not start a sentence with and or but”;

• moreover, because of the ‘proper’ usage established during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when a lot of dictionaries, grammars, books on rhetoric, style, and elocution appeared, a ‘linguistic morality’ (Randolph Quirk) began to take shape, with the following commandments:

1. There is only one correct English. But, is there, when the same person can use, let’s say for the word ‘drink’ either alcoholic beverage (official) ,refreshment (formal, official), drink (general), swift pint, swift half (informal), bevvy (Scots, Northern English, informal), wee dram (Scots, friendly)?;

2. Not following the rules is to contribute to language degeneration. The absurdity of this statement was pointed out by Victor Hugo when he asked, after a member de l’Académie Française had declared that French language began to decline in 1789, ‘À quelle heure, s’il vous plaît?’;

3. Previous meanings and uses of a word are better than later ones. This is an ‘etymological fallacy’, because language changes mainly through metaphor, and, without it, it would become neutral;

4. The borrowings from other languages corrupt the purity of English language. No comment there😊.

Overall, an interesting study that try and captures the life of the English language (but can be extrapolated to any other language) healthy and picturesque mainly because of the ordinary speaker and not language specialists:

To use Shakespeare’s time-honoured phrase, our ability to look at language through corpora constitutes a true sea change in the study of English. In a sort of human genome project for language, evidence from a corpus allows dictionary makers and linguists to look both at the whole genetic structure of English, and at the genetic make-up of each and every word. They can build up a picture of English as used and validated by the entire language community who speak it—for in the end it is speakers, not dictionaries, who decide how language is used.

[Jennifer B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was fun, entertaining, and educational. I've learned many new expressions to spice up my American English with.

[Ralph · Rating 4 out of 5]

A damp squid? Some kind of wet cephalopod? If you are familiar with the phrase, you might be British, and if you are British, you might expect the book to be a disappointment, for such is the meaning of "damp squid." However, the book is anything but disappointing, and exposes many of the mechanisms by which words (or lemmas, as the author calls them) enter and leave the English language, and how they mutate over time. Getting back to the soggy squid for a moment, it was originally "damp squib," with a squib being fireworks...damp fireworks cannot explode, hence a term for a disappointment. But "squib" loses its meaning, claims the author, and people, in searching for a new word that makes sense, change "squib" to "squid." To tell the truth, I'd never heard the phrase before, but to me "squib" was a synonym for "blank," as in a cartridge with gunpowder but no bullet. So, the original term makes more sense to me than what the Brits have chosen to call it. And yet the lemma "squib" continues on with a new lease on life, now known to millions as the non-magical offspring of magical parents, in the Harry Potter books.

Anyone curious as to the mechanics of language and the problems facing lexicographers in this age of infernal digital machines will find this book fascinating, though English purists will be depressed to find out there is no way to prevent the formation of new words or to stop old words from gathering new (and annoying) meanings. From "what is a word" to "where does it come from" to "how is it spelled and used," the entire gamut of English is, as the subtitle promises, laid bare...not to be confused with naked.

[Carl · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book about the English language, focusing on the study of “text corpora”. A text corpus is a collection of different words from various sources: books, newspapers, blogs, emails, etc. There are several corpora, but the biggest is the Oxford Corpus, with two billion words.

Study of the Oxford Corpus shows that just ten words account for 25% of the occurrences. Examples of these most common words are “the, of, and, to, that, have”. This is not of earth-shattering importance, but I find it interesting. The top 100 words account for 50% of occurrences. The majority of these are Old English words – the bedrock of English.

The Oxford Corpus contains the contexts where the words occur: what other words are near, which tells us the connotations of words, going beyond their dictionary definitions. The Corpus also shows differences in regional use of words across the English-speaking world.

Computer analysis of the corpora is data mining applied to the English language, potentially a useful tool for linguists. It will be interesting to see corpora derived from spoken English, and to also see how the language changes. Perhaps there will be automatic syntactic analysis?

[Ed Erwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read lots of books on language, so I keep seeing the same tired old examples brought out to illustrate language change. This one, though, is written for a British audience, so while the ideas were not new to me, the examples often were. ("Damp Squi(b/d)" for example, must be a more common expression there than here!)

The main point of this book is to introduce to a wide audience the idea of using a digital corpus to examine how language is actually used in real life, rather than relying on examples found by experts.

A hard-core prescriptivist may not like the focus on "actual" rather than "correct" usage, but may still enjoy the introduction to using a corpus to explore usage changes.

The author talks a lot about how large the particular corpus he used was. Sure, it was big, but, they are growing all the time. Google's n-gram is the current size champ, and is available for anyone to explore. (I just used it now to see whether the spelling "alot" is on the rise or not. I like it better than the "correct" spelling. But n-gram shows that the use of that spelling is falling-off after a peak in the 1980s.)

[M · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite a light hearted book, let down by (to me) impenetrable charts showing how word frequencies occurred. Also by at least one error, which I checked by consulting the OED Online. (Just so I could be sure I was correct in thinking he'd got it wrong). It is interesting to see how the use of words can be shown using the databases of quotations and this aspect was fairly fresh and original, otherwise I found 'Why is Q always followed by U' a better word book.

[Megan Kiekel · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you’re a wordie like I am, then you’ll absolutely love this.

This book focuses on the English language: where it came from, how it changes, how scholars keep track of it, and how dictionaries (more specifically, the Oxford English Dictionary) are created.

Sound dry? It’s totally not. The tone of the book is very conversational and often quite humorous. The layout of the book is also appealing and keeps the information separated and easy on the eyes.

[Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I also won a free copy of this book at the American Library Association conference. It's a look at the evolving nature of the English language. I found this book to be much more engaging than Alphabetter Juice because it had more of a narrative to it. It was actually rather interesting and a very quick read.

[Martine Peacock]

With a name like Damp Squid, I was expecting this book to be a lot more fun than it was. I only really scanned through it as I was intentionally looking for fun ideas to do with the English language. Undoubtedly an "interesting" book but not one you'd buy for someone who wasn't seriously into the construction and origins etc of English.

[Alison · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this one up because of a review I read in the Economist... maybe its a British thing, but I don't understand why so many people raved about this book. I found it boring and kept waiting for it to get better. Alas, no.

[Morgan Bird · Rating 3 out of 5]

Considering the topic, this was an easy read and pretty interesting. The author uses the OED and the Oxford Corpus to show how words come into use or change their meanings over time.

[trisha · Rating 4 out of 5]

entertaining...for a word geek. right up my alley

[Morgan]

I heard the author interviewed on the radio and this sounds like my cup of eggcorns.

[JulieK · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a gift from my brother. Some interesting parts, some parts that were a bit too esoteric for me. Recommended for serious word nerds only.

[Shan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fun and interesting read for people interested in the evolution of and communication using the English language.

[Adrian · Rating 3 out of 5]

So many words.... so many meanings.... a good read

[Roberta · Rating 4 out of 5]

A small, short book of descriptive linguistics based on the use of corpora to understand how English is being used in reality, this is a quick, enjoyable and helpful read for people interested in language. It is not a guide to correct English - it describes the use of English by real people, so if you are looking for a prescriptive tool, this is not it.

[Lorraine · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found it too dry (ironically) at this time, having just returned from hospital, I need something meatier to get my teeth into so this is my first 'did not finish' book

[Aiyana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unlike many other books on the history of the English language, this one takes advantage of the massive data processing power of our modern age in order to examine how words are used-- which words are used most frequently, which ones often occur together, how a word can change depending on context, and so on.

Some of the tables are a bit hard to follow, but in general, the book is very accessible, full of short quotations, and often humorous. As an American, I was also intrigued to see the similarities and differences between our respective idioms, pet peeves, and linguistic mistakes. I, for instance, had never heard the term "damp squib," of which the book's title is an "eggcorn" (and if you don't know that term, I highly encourage you to look it up!).

I also got introduced to such tongue-in-cheek neologisms as "cobwebsite" (a website that has not been updated in far too long), "cyberchondria" (self-diagnosing with an illness you've read about online), and "dopplegoogler" (a person sharing your name whom you discover when looking yourself up). And I realized just how intensely metaphorical our everyday language is-- not just when it's raining cats and dogs (or, if you are Welsh, "raining old women and sticks"), but also when we weed out unnecessary phrases, clutter our minds with trivia, or butcher the pronunciation of a word.

to quote:
"Language often conveys attitudes and evaluations of situations and events, rather than pure information." p 104

[Mike Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a statistician's view of the English language, and, unfortunately, is occasionally as dry as any other statistical report. The author explains how dictionary makers collect millions of samples of written English from around the electronic world and then analyze the frequency and usage of words and phrases to try to reverse-engineer how people are using English. There are some interesting factoids, and the author's style is fine, but the approach is just not as entertaining as, say, the book "Eats, Shoots and Leaves". In addition, the author is British and is clearly writing for a British audience. A North American reader has to be careful not to misinterpret some of the uniquely British phrases (like the title itself, which is apparently a common phrase in the UK). One interesting observation: apparently "dove" as the past tense of "dive" is a Canadian thing. Brits and Americans say "dived". Not a bad book, just not as fun as some other books on the quirks of English.

[Rosy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three and a half stars, really. At the beginning I was grumpy and disappointed at idiocy such as, "If you laid all the words in the Corpus end to end the line would stretch from the northern tip of Scotland to the Southern tip of New Zealand."

What?

Also, "...the commoner meanings are often much more frequent than the less common ones..." (There's probably an excuse for this second example, but still.) Then I found myself reading word histories that I have read before.

But in spite of all that I found the whole book interesting. It covers ground I've read elsewhere but quite intentionally with reference to and from the perspective of the Oxford Corpus (and corpora in general). Fun but not hilarious and interesting but put-downable. I definitely don't not recommend this book.

[Jurgita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really a fun read. I do love learning about languages and how people communicate and history of it. Some of the facts were quite fascinating and I think they helped to improve my English to understand how it works.
It lost one star due to some rather dry patches.

[Jen H · Rating 4 out of 5]

A funny and fascinating read for grammar and language geeks.

[岩倉 NIV7 · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice synopsis of language history, and felt like a shorter, shallower version of a college class I took on the same subject.