Yesterday we went to Ulladulla to see the dentist. It's the only place where I'm allowed to open my mouth. Four hundred and fifty-two dollars later - the old dentist has long retired and the practice been bought out by a much younger one who's intent on getting rich on me before my last tooth has fallen out - I could just afford to pick up a few books from the op-shop, including J.P. Davidson's "Planet Word" which accompanies the BBC series of the same name which I had already bought some years ago.
"Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot."
Do we 'take a bath' or 'have a bath', do you use a 'napkin' or a 'serviette' and are you wearing 'spectacles' to read this or your 'glasses'? How we speak and what we say (or don't say) reveals so much about our identity, but does where we come from influence how we think? Does a Frenchman better understand love or a German-speaker have a more technical way of looking at the world?
"Planet Word" uncovers everything you didn't know you needed to know about how language evolves: from feral children to deaf Tourette's syndrome, fairy-tale princesses and wicked stepmothers to secret codes, invented languages, backslang - even a language that was eaten!
This book is a round-the-world trip of a lifetime contained in four-hundred-plus pages, well worth the pain (financial and otherwise) of having gone to the dentist.
