Words on the Move
Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally)
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Narrated by:
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John McWhorter
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By:
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John McWhorter
About this listen
A best-selling linguist takes us on a lively tour of how the English language is evolving before our eyes - and why we should embrace this transformation and not fight it.
Language is always changing - but we tend not to like it. We understand that new words must be created for new things, but the way English is spoken today rubs many of us the wrong way. Whether it's the use of literally to mean "figuratively" rather than "by the letter" or the way young people use LOL and like, or business jargon like what's the ask? - it often seems as if the language is deteriorating before our eyes.
But the truth is different and a lot less scary, as John McWhorter shows in this delightful and eye-opening exploration of how English has always been in motion and continues to evolve today. Drawing examples from everyday life and employing a generous helping of humor, he shows that these shifts are a natural process common to all languages and that we should embrace and appreciate these changes, not condemn them.
Words on the Move opens our eyes to the surprising backstories to the words and expressions we use every day. Did you know that silly once meant "blessed"? Or that ought was the original past tense of owe? Or that the suffix -ly in adverbs is actually a remnant of the word like? And have you ever wondered why some people from New Orleans sound as if they come from Brooklyn?
McWhorter encourages us to marvel at the dynamism and resilience of the English language, and his book offers a lively journey through which we discover that words are ever on the move, and our lives are all the richer for it.
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Early in the history of English, glamour and grammar were the same word, linked to enchantment and magical spells. Now grammar brings to mind language bullies and bored-out-of-their-skulls students. Roy Peter Clark, one of America’s most influential writing teachers, wants to change that by putting the glamour back into grammar.
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Wasteful
- By ABID on 12-05-13
By: Roy Peter Clark
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Words and Rules
- The Ingredients of Language
- By: Steven Pinker
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 13 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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First published in 2000, Words and Rules remains one of Pinker's most provocative and accessible books, illuminating the fascinating relationship between the brain, the mind, and how language makes us humans.
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Amazing how much irregular verbs can teach.
- By Tristan on 04-10-16
By: Steven Pinker
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Poetry in Person
- Twenty-five Years of Conversation with America's Poets
- By: Lucille Clifton, Alexander Neubauer - editor, Eamon Grennan, and others
- Narrated by: Alexander Neubauer
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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This first audio edition of Poetry in Person: 25 Years of Conversation with America’s Poets (Knopf, 2010), invites listeners into an intimate classroom with eight acclaimed poets. Full of compelling, in-depth conversation about manuscripts and drafts by the poets themselves, plus readings of the finished poems, these historic recordings offer one of the most detailed portraits ever produced of how poems are actually made.
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Fascinating
- By d on 08-28-16
By: Lucille Clifton, and others
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You Say Potato: A Book About Accents
- By: Ben Crystal, David Crystal
- Narrated by: David Crystal, Ben Crystal, Jane Savage, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Some people say 'sconn' while others say 'schown'. He says 'bath' while she says 'bahth'. You say 'potayto'. I say 'potahto'. And - wait a second, no one says 'potahto'. No one's ever said 'potahto'. Have they? From reconstructing Shakespeare's accent to the rise and fall of received pronunciation, actor Ben Crystal and his linguist father, David, travel the world in search of the stories of spoken English.
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Wish there were more native recordings.
- By Matt Dobler on 07-01-16
By: Ben Crystal, and others
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Born to Kvetch
- Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods
- By: Michael Wex
- Narrated by: Michael Wex
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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As the main spoken language of the Jews for more than a thousand years, Yiddish has had plenty to lament, plenty to conceal. Its phrases and expressions paint a comprehensive picture of the mind-set that enabled the Jews of Europe to survive persecution: they never stopped kvetching about God, gentiles, children, and everything else.
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Fascinating, but...
- By Christopher B. on 04-05-16
By: Michael Wex
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The Elements of Eloquence
- Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase
- By: Mark Forsyth
- Narrated by: Don Hagen
- Length: 5 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In his inimitably entertaining and wonderfully witty style, he takes apart famous phrases and shows how you too can write like Shakespeare or quip like Oscar Wilde. Whether you’re aiming to achieve literary immortality or just hoping to deliver the perfect one-liner, The Elements of Eloquence proves that you don’t need to have anything important to say - you simply need to say it well.
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Who knew rhetoric could be so much fun?
- By Philo on 10-30-14
By: Mark Forsyth
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How to Write Short
- Word Craft for Fast Times
- By: Roy Peter Clark
- Narrated by: Roy Peter Clark
- Length: 5 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In How to Write Short , Roy Peter Clark turns his attention to the art of painting a thousand pictures with just a few words. Short forms of writing have always existed - from ship logs and telegrams to prayers and haikus. But in this ever-changing Internet age, short-form writing has become an essential skill. Clark covers how to write effective and powerful titles, headlines, essays, sales pitches, Tweets, letters, and even self-descriptions for online dating services.
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Ironically long
- By Amazon Customer on 03-14-16
By: Roy Peter Clark
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Babel No More
- The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners
- By: Michael Erard
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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We all learn at least one language as children. But what does it take to learn six languages...or seventy? In Babel No More, Michael Erard, "a monolingual with benefits," sets out on a quest to meet language superlearners and make sense of their mental powers. On the way he uncovers the secrets of historical figures like Italian cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti, who was said to speak seventy-two languages; Emil Krebs, a pugnacious German diplomat, who spoke sixty-eight languages; and Lomb Kat, a Hungarian who taught herself Russian by reading Russian romance novels.
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Heavy on anecdote, light on science
- By S. Yates on 07-15-16
By: Michael Erard
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How to Speak and Write Correctly
- By: Joseph Devlin
- Narrated by: Shawn Grisden
- Length: 4 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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This book has no pretension about it whatever -- it is neither a Manual of Rhetoric, expatiating on the dogmas of style, nor a Grammar full of arbitrary rules and exceptions. It is merely an effort to help ordinary, everyday people to express themselves in ordinary, everyday language, in a proper manner.
By: Joseph Devlin
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The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead
- Dos and Don'ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life
- By: Charles Murray
- Narrated by: Charles Murray
- Length: 3 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Best-selling social historian Charles Murray has written a delightfully fussy - and entertaining - book on the hidden rules of the road in the workplace - and in life - from the standpoint of an admonishing, but encouraging, workplace grouch and taskmaster. Why the curmudgeon? The fact is that most older, more senior people in the workplace are closet curmudgeons. In today's politically correct world, they may hide their displeasure over your misuse of grammar or your overly familiar use of their first name without an express invitation. But don't be fooled by their pleasant demeanor....
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Good Book: From one curmudgeon to another
- By DaWoolf on 05-22-14
By: Charles Murray
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The Pun Also Rises
- How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics
- By: John Pollack
- Narrated by: Pete Larkin
- Length: 4 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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The Pun Also Rises is an authoritative yet playful exploration of a practice that is common, in one form or another, to virtually every language on earth. At once entertaining and educational, this engaging book answers fundamental questions: Just what is a pun, and why do people make them? How did punning impact the development of human language, and how did that drive creativity and progress? And why, after centuries of decline, does the pun still matter?
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Punderful Little Book
- By B. Lane on 01-10-13
By: John Pollack
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How Fiction Works
- By: James Wood
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Ranging widely from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings, Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. He sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision, resulting in nothing less than a philosophy of the novel, which has won critical acclaim nationwide, from the San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Times Book Review.
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Educational!
- By Don on 05-04-09
By: James Wood
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In The Sense of Style, the best-selling linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker answers these questions and more. Rethinking the usage guide for the 21st century, Pinker doesn’t carp about the decline of language or recycle pet peeves from the rulebooks of a century ago. Instead, he applies insights from the sciences of language and mind to the challenge of crafting clear, coherent, and stylish prose.
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A great book, done a great injustice by the audio
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Today we think statistics are the enemy, numbers used to mislead and confuse us. That’s a mistake, Tim Harford says in The Data Detective. We shouldn’t be suspicious of statistics - we need to understand what they mean and how they can improve our lives: they are, at heart, human behavior seen through the prism of numbers and are often “the only way of grasping much of what is going on around us”.
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I expected more
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Sherlock Holmes: The Complete BBC Collection
- 60 Full-Cast Dramatisations
- By: Arthur Conan Doyle, Bert Coules
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Beginning with A Study in Scarlet and concluding with The Hound of the Baskervilles, this epic project took over 8 years to complete - and this landmark collection contains the extraordinary result. Here is the world's first ever fully dramatised Sherlock Holmes canon: 56 short stories and 4 novels, all made by the same team of directors, producers, dramatists and leading actors, and packed with the high production qualities of a film or TV drama that set it apart.
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A nice collection
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What listeners say about Words on the Move
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Dubi
- 09-20-17
I'm Literally Giving In on Literally
This is how powerful John McWhorter's book is: he instantly convinced me to abandon my longtime vociferous distaste for using literally to mean the opposite of literally. I won't give his argument away, as it is the centerpiece of the first of his five chapters on how and why English changes over time. Read it (listen to it) for yourself, you will not be disappointed.
McWhorter makes a brief and much less spirited case for tolerating irregardless which fails to alter my opinion that that is just a stupid mistake that would be better off relegated to the realm of the obsolete, though sadly it lives on. But in general, he makes a strong case against prescriptive dictates (i.e. the usage police).
Other books dwell on historical events that have caused discreet shifts in English -- Viking and Norman invasions, church Latin, et.al. McWhorter deals with that in other books. Here, he focuses on natural evolutionary trends in language -- how meanings change when they take on subjective properties, how they narrow or broaden through usage, how words morph into grammar, etc. The whole idea being that change is ongoing and inevitable.
Overall, except for an overlong and not altogether interesting chapter on how vowel sounds evolve, this book is just wonderful (in both the contemporary and Melville-era senses of that word). That McWhorter narrates it himself just makes it that much more interesting and powerful, since he knows exactly what he is saying and how he wants to say it.
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- Steve
- 07-29-17
Words change their meanings over time
What made the experience of listening to Words on the Move the most enjoyable?
Having the author narrate his own work and using many examples to explain his reasoning.
What did you like best about this story?
Etymology.
Have you listened to any of John McWhorter’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
No. This is my first.
If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?
Don't know. It doesn't seem to fit the film format.
Any additional comments?
The study of words and their origins are interesting enough, but this book shows how words change over time.
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- Christopher
- 11-15-18
An interesting way of seeing the language
This book opens ones eyes to the way in which languages in general, and English specifically, change over time. One need only pick up a copy of Shakespeare's plays or look at the King James Bible to see how much change there has been in just the last 400 years. I'm not sure I'm sold on his main point, but it is an interesting notion. #EyeOpening #AlternativePerspective #tagsgiving #sweepstakes
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- Margaret
- 09-25-16
Review By a Fan
I follow Prof. McWhorter--listen to his books, watch his Ted Talks; if he were to give a lecture in my town, I'd buy a ticket. He has several themes he returns to over and over again: that languages evolve, that English is not spoken correctly vs. incorrectly, but in dialects, the effect of texting on the language and so on. He hits them again in Words on the Move.
Some people might eventually find this slightly repetitive, but not me. I like his jokes, his anecdotes and--occasionally--his total goofy nerdiness. (His comprehensive knowledge of vintage sit coms, for example.) So I'm giving this five stars because I enjoy all of the above. If you don't, you'll still like the book, but you may not feel motivated to award five stars. I totally get that. You do you, I do me...
Recommend.
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62 people found this helpful
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- Paul Condarcuri jr
- 05-16-17
Wow!
I love words, but am certainly not a linguist. Didn't even know I had a learning disability until I was 25. This book made me take pause though. Upon the clarification, towards the end, that there is still time and place for the use of unconventional words/grammar I was absolutely on board with stopping my grammar policing.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Erin Riggs
- 12-21-18
Informative and funny
McWhorter writes a very informative, and useful book as well as being funny and sometimes goofy. This book is great in audio as you hear McWhorter’s subtle pronunciations and word play really well. Highly recommend for the word snob!
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- Kevin Donohue
- 06-22-17
interesting story and great narration
Normally I think it is unwise for authors to read their own books. They don't have the skills to put energy and color into the narration. However this author is the exception to the rule. Ths was a great narration which could never have been done better by anybody else. He made the case that all languages is in transition and supported that with a broad view of language over the centuries and detailed knowledge of that transition in English.
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- just asking for some common sense
- 04-06-20
Fascinating look at our language
Languages change while they're are alive and English is no exception. I cringe at some changes and know I can't stop its progress even when I try. This book pointed how the language is changing, and not just words and grammatical structure; John McWhorter discusses how sounds are changing right in front of us.
I like this book because it not only explains things, it has heart and humor. I don't know if there are charts in the print book, but I would like a couple for the vowel changes. I love linguistics, but I think this book is accessible even if the subject is new to you.
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- Gabriel Connolly
- 08-18-20
Like literally so betch
You will like literally love this book. OMG It is like so betch. LOL. icecream...
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- ROBERT VENDRAMIN
- 10-06-22
Fascinating
This is the best story about words and language that I have encountered. It’s both modern and historical review of words is fascinating.
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