ABOUT THIS BOOK

What do words like unkindness, haggard, asparagus, jizz, and the singular they have to do with birds? Quite a lot, actually. From Old English roots and Shakespearean idioms to Victorian slang and modern online lingo, Birding English charts a dynamic course through English’s past, present, and future by admiring the plumage of falcons, the songs of sparrows, and the flight of ducks. With each of his fifty mini essays, Jeremy Withers uses birds as a point of entry into a key moment in the development of English: its origins in the Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic languages, the influence of writers like Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, the creation of English’s first dictionaries and grammar books, and the arrival of rhyming slang and portmanteaus. Ideal for word nerds and bird nerds alike, this book will enchant anyone who’s ever been captivated by the song of a bird or the song of a word.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Jeremy Withers is associate professor of English at Iowa State University. He is author of Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles: Contesting the Road in American Science Fiction. Withers lives in Ames, Iowa.

REVIEWS

“A brilliantly ingenious bringing together of two worlds, which will inform and entertain linguists and birders alike. I learned a huge amount about birdlore from each chapter; and I've no doubt that bird-lovers will find the linguistic perspective equally fascinating. An unexpectedly illuminating synergy.”—David Crystal, author, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language

“Birding English is a wide-ranging and delightful blend of ornithology and linguistics, with a wealth of surprising facts you’ll want to immediately share at a party. It offers valuable insights on the past, present, and future of birds and language, showing the importance of understanding where we’ve been so that we can appropriately meet future challenges, both as speakers of a living language and as creatures in the natural world.”—Rosemary Mosco, author, The Birding Dictionary: A Tongue-In-Cheek Guide for People Who Find Themselves Obsessed, Against All Logic and Reason, with Birds

“This imaginative book retells the history of the English Language through the names of birds. From Indo-European, through Old Norse and Old English, and reaching into languages from Africa to the South Pacific, Jeremy Withers explores how the sounds and sense of English changed in response to the landscape and the forms of life. Birds were omens; they were divinities; they were food; they sang; they flocked. They were a kind of parallel society to humans, and by looking at the avian imagination, Withers shows how we are really looking at ourselves. He has traveled far and wide, collecting words much as an explorer would collect exotic specimens. His book is thus a dazzling menagerie, inviting readers to let the familiar and the strange alight on our shoulders with a twitter in our ears.”—Seth Lerer, author, Introducing the History of the English Language

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Introduction

1. Graylag Goose: Proto-Indo-European

2. Canada Goose: Umlaut

3. Peregrine Falcon: Metathesis and Semantic Expansion

4. Great Skua: Old Norse

5. Mute Swan: Kennings

6. Killdeer: Onomatopoeia

7. Common Raven: The Persistence of Old English

8. Black-billed Cuckoo: The Norman Conquest

9. Gyrfalcon: More on the Norman Conquest

10. Golden Oriole: Geoffrey Chaucer

11. Black-capped Chickadee: Collective Nouns

12. Golden Eagle: The Inkhorn Controversy

13. Dodo: Renaissance Expansion

14. Northern Saw-whet Owl: Henry Cockeram’s English Dictionarie

15. European Starling: William Shakespeare

16. Spanish Sparrow: The Bible

17. Red-winged Blackbird: The History of Punctuation

18. White Stork: Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language

19. House Sparrow: Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue

20. Eurasian Magpie: Eighteenth-Century Grammarians

21. Bald Eagle: Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language

22. Canada Jay: Indigenous Influences on American English

23. Common Merganser: British vs. American English

24. Sharp-shinned Hawk: Diminutive Suffixes

25. Ruddy Duck: Reduplication

26. Club-winged Manakin: Back-Formation

27. European Robin: Rhyming Slang

28. Bearded Reedling: Portmanteaus

29. Ross’s Goose: Eponyms

30. Northern Flicker: Standard and Nonstandard English

31. White-throated Sparrow: Mnemonics

32. Ring-necked Pheasant: The Language of Sports

33. Herring Gull: The Oxford English Dictionary

34. Toulouse Goose: Subversive Dictionaries

35. Common Nighthawk: Words with Hidden Connections

36. Cedar Waxwing: Folk Etymology

37. Dickcissel: Vulgar Language

38. Florida Scrub Jay: Insults

39. Domestic Chicken: More on Insults

40. Greater Prairie-Chicken: Lesser-Known Influential Languages

41. Galah: Global English

42. Blackburnian Warbler: African American English

43. Indigo Bunting: Is It English Yet?

44. Bermuda Petrel: Computers and the Internet

45. Field Sparrow: Texting

46. Anna’s Hummingbird: Social Media

47. Northern Cardinal: The Singular They

48. Yellow-billed Cuckoo: Sexist Language

49. Long-tailed Duck: Racist Language

50. Common Murre: The Future of English

Acknowledgments

Bibliographic Essay

Index

REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you with an electronic file for alternative access.

Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.

It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.