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thenorwegianprince's review
5.0
A truly interesting and amusing look at linguistics and semantics. definitely recommend this one to anyone interested in how we communicate.
hopeadinfinitum's review
informative
medium-paced
4.5
A really good primer for learning about language and linguistics, very readable and with lots of excellent examples. Lots of the content was familiar to me from a long ago AS level, but I still learned a lot of new, interesting things. My two small critiques would be - firstly, the few examples of the Geordie dialect are awful, they don’t ring true, which bugged me a little; and secondly there was a passage about how there is no gender neutral pronoun that would allow us to avoid saying ‘he or she/his or her’ etc… the mental gymnastics required to avoid the use of ‘they/their/them’ to refer to people of unknown gender in this book must have been astonishing.
sondaire's review
5.0
Language is my passion (and my degree subject) so it was almost a certainty going in that I'd enjoy this. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find how accessible it was, and I can imagine that for people who had no knowledge whatsoever it would be a good place to start to learn a lot. There were moments of humour dotted all throughout, and I found myself reading it cover to cover as though it were a novel. It would definitely be easy to read each section individually though, as the topics are separated very clearly. I'd definitely recommend it for all people, whether they have a background in linguistics or not!
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