What do words like unkindness, haggard, asparagus, jizz, and the singular they have to do with birds? Quite a lot, actually. From Old English roots and Shakespearean idioms to Victorian slang and modern online lingo, Birding English charts a dynamic course through English’s past, present, and future by admiring the plumage of falcons, the songs of sparrows, and the flight of ducks. With each of his fifty mini essays, Jeremy Withers uses birds as a point of entry into a key moment in the development of English: its origins in the Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic languages, the influence of writers like Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, the creation of English’s first dictionaries and grammar books, and the arrival of rhyming slang and portmanteaus. Ideal for word nerds and bird nerds alike, this book will enchant anyone who’s ever been captivated by the song of a bird or the song of a word.
“A brilliantly ingenious bringing together of two worlds, which will inform and entertain linguists and birders alike. I learned a huge amount about birdlore from each chapter; and I've no doubt that bird-lovers will find the linguistic perspective equally fascinating. An unexpectedly illuminating synergy.”—David Crystal, author, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language
“Birding English is a wide-ranging and delightful blend of ornithology and linguistics, with a wealth of surprising facts you’ll want to immediately share at a party. It offers valuable insights on the past, present, and future of birds and language, showing the importance of understanding where we’ve been so that we can appropriately meet future challenges, both as speakers of a living language and as creatures in the natural world.”—Rosemary Mosco, author, The Birding Dictionary: A Tongue-In-Cheek Guide for People Who Find Themselves Obsessed, Against All Logic and Reason, with Birds
“This imaginative book retells the history of the English Language through the names of birds. From Indo-European, through Old Norse and Old English, and reaching into languages from Africa to the South Pacific, Jeremy Withers explores how the sounds and sense of English changed in response to the landscape and the forms of life. Birds were omens; they were divinities; they were food; they sang; they flocked. They were a kind of parallel society to humans, and by looking at the avian imagination, Withers shows how we are really looking at ourselves. He has traveled far and wide, collecting words much as an explorer would collect exotic specimens. His book is thus a dazzling menagerie, inviting readers to let the familiar and the strange alight on our shoulders with a twitter in our ears.”—Seth Lerer, author, Introducing the History of the English Language
“Smart, sharp, and surprising. Birding English connects the dots between language, history, and culture in ways I didn’t anticipate, from Shakespeare to rhyming slang, Chaucer to the Notorious B.I.G. If you love etymology, sociology, and learning about the uniqueness of the English language, including my new favorite word ‘heezie-hosie,’ you’ll delight in this book.”—Becca Rowland, author, Bird Talk: Hilariously Accurate Ways to Identify Birds by the Sounds They Make
