This review of Kory Stamper’s Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries contains some mild spoilers. Your discretion is required even though these spoilers won’t ruin your reading experience for certain.
The rule is simple. It’s (with an apostrophe) is a contraction for ‘it is’ or ‘it has’. The one without an apostrophe (its) signals possession. But how did we arrive at this rule? Who makes them anyway?
Once upon a time in the 17th century, an English poet by the name of John Dryden went nuts and decided that it shall be a crime to use the two derivatives of ‘it’ (it’s and its) in any manner other than the one decided by him and him alone. It was also decided that any misuse or confusion between the two derivatives shall remain a crime punishable with the offender being swallowed by some Grammar Nazi that shall monitor and censor the internet for the same.
Kory Stamper’s Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries tells stories of politics and personal peeves that have come to shape the English language as we know it today. Those personal peeves never truly accomplished much since the language continued to belong to its users for the larger part. Nonetheless, the likes of John Dryden did leave their own mark on the language.
Lexicographer (noun)
/ˌlek-sə-ˈkä-grə-fər/
an author or editor of a dictionary
Besides, I recommend her book primarily for the stories that it has to tell. ‘It’ has more stories to tell you than this blog can possibly allow. You should also find it interesting to peep into some stupid trajectories of evolution that a language may follow, ‘irregardless’ of your inclination. Even the small words like ‘go’, ‘take’, ‘make’, ‘as’, ‘for’ and possibly ‘more’, that we take for granted, may each give lexicographers a nightmare at their job.
Learning English as a non-native speaker, the language probably has frustrated you for its sheer lack of logic. Kory’s book will rather make you fall in love with this illogicality. The author has her unique and beautiful treatment of the English language as a child. I’ll now end this blog with an often-quoted excerpt from the book.
“We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets. We dress it in fancy clothes and tell it to behave, and it comes home with its underwear on its head and wearing someone else’s socks. As English grows, it lives its own life, and this is right and healthy.” — Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries.
Purchase your copy of Kory Stamper’s Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries on Amazon.
You may also want to check my bookshelf for more book recommendations. For now, we recommend you reading this revisit of Rabindranath Tagore’s Nationalism.