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Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English by Ben Yagoda.
For a time, Ben Yagoda maintained a blog called Not One-Off Britishisms (or NOOB https://notoneoffbritishisms.com/) in which he tracked British usages in the US. In Gobsmacked!, he collected many of these and expanded them into a -chapter book that explore the origins of the words in British English and follows their entry into American English, drawing on the Google Books N-grams viewer. Plus after most NOOBs, he ranks them as merely “On the Radar,” “Emerging,” “Taking Hold,” “Fully Arrived” or “Outpaced” (by US usage). Among other things we learn about are shambolic, naughty bits, whinge, veg, schooner, and poo, as well as pronunciations of aunt and often. Early on, he offers some thoughts on why the pace of British to US English has been accelerating (the internet plays a role as does snobbery). Gobsmacked! is a splendid read and one that can be savored in small bits by language aficionados and professional linguists.
Play It Again Sam: Repetition in the Arts by Samuel Jay Keyser
The legendary Samuel Jay Keyser (linguist, author, administrator, jazz musician) offers a tour de force of the role of repetition in the arts. Drawing on research showing that repletion is both pleasurable, evolutionarily useful, and protean.
While most of us would have a hard time writing knowledgably about any one art, Keyser offers fourteen chapters covering literature, music and art. He begins by recounting some experiments by Princeton psychologist Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, whose work has show that listeners prefer music with repeated melodies. Next he turns to the notion of repetition in traditional English poetry, drawing in the relevant linguistic concepts seamlessly, then looking at musical rhymes and the role of repletion in such verbal forms as idioms, jokes, and fairy tales. The rule of three is illustrated along with poetic meter, oral formulaic poetry, biblical parallelism, and jazz figure. In the penultimate chapter, Keyser turns to repetition in the visual arts (painting and photography, analyzing paintings by Andy Warhol and by Gustave Caillebotte) as well as photographs by Lee Friedlander, Roni Horn, and Ormond Gigli. He wraps things up with a repetition of the key points are a quartet of Ps: Parallelism, Priming, Prediction, and Pleasure.
Keyser’s brisk exposition and lucid analysis has provoked me to look for an think about the role of repetition in all manner of things. A definite must read, and (as I learned belatedly), it’s available free as an open source book: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5985/Play-It-Again-SamRepetition-in-the-Arts
Amity: A Novel by Nathan Harris
Nathan Harris follows up his The Sweetness of Water with a gripping story of two siblings, Coleman and June. It starts in New Orleans in 1866, with the sensitive, bookish Coleman and steely June, are former slaves still in the employ, so to speak, of their former owners Wyatt and
Wyatt cannot is nearly destitute so he heads off to Mexico in search of a silver mine, taking June along. Eventually Harper writes for the Coleman to come along and the imperious Mrs. Harper his wife and spoiled daughter Florence go as well booking passage on a steamboat. Over the course of the journey, Coleman is changed by a shipwreck, a kidnapping, and more, and he and June, who has endured both Wyatt Harper and the desert before finding love with a named Isaac, a black Seminole are reunited in the community Amity.
Amity is an adventure story, lushly scenic, , but also a story of race and racisms, power and corruption, survival and love.
