ŷ������

I really don’t want to spoil this book for you �� because I enjoyed it a lot and it would be far too easy to write something that gave the whole thing away. This is part coming of age story �� part war story �� part fascination with words �� part history of the OED. And these are a few of my favourite things.

The thing I liked most about this book was the question whether or not words mean different things to men than they do to women. And are there such things as ‘women’s words��? I imagine a lot of people would look at those questions and immediately answer ‘no�� to both of them. But this book presents a pretty compelling case for why we should perhaps hesitate in answering those questions.

I like the post-structuralist idea that language, or, at least, the vocabulary of a language, is a ‘system of differences�� and that it is impossible to have two words that ‘mean the same thing�� in much the same way that Leibniz would challenge people to find two ‘identical�� leaves in a garden �� the impossibility of which should be clear by logical deduction that an empirical proof is impossible and unnecessary.

Words are the same �� there can be no two that mean exactly the same �� and a large part of the point of an historical dictionary like the OED is to provide quotes of ‘first uses�� for the shades of meaning that words have.

I guess in much the same way that young Blacks in the US have sought to reclaim the N word, or how some women have sought to reclaim words like ‘bitch��, there can be ‘women’s words�� in that sense. But I do think it is possible this goes deeper still. Where words have textures that feel different depending on where one is placed within society �� and gender is such an obsessive dividing line in our society (with us often being marked as pink or blue before we are even born) that it would hardly be surprising if such categorisation didn’t deeply impact the language we use and how it means to us.

The author mentions a word as being ‘like a character�� in the book �� and what I found particularly nice about this word was how its meaning changed during the book for the main character, from a word of oppression to one of love.

I had better shut up now or I will give thing away �� but this was a lovely book.

Oh, I did want to say one other thing, people often expect authors to have a ‘voice�� and to acquire this voice they need to do weird shit with language, weird shit that is then understood to be their ‘style��. I’ve started noticing that a political journalist here I quite like will throw in odd little things in her articles about politics that I need to go look up. For example “ingenue in search of a svengali�� or “humblebrag��. It would have been so easy for the author here to have done stuff like that �� but I can’t think of a time when she did. Her writing is always clear, lovely simple sentences. Her style and voice is her own �� with no need lose the reader. I liked this a lot.