by Jeremy Butterfield · Oxford University Press, USA · tapa blanda · ISBN 9780199574094
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«Damp Squid» is Jeremy Butterfield's essay on the English language, published by Oxford University Press in paperback (179 pages, in English).
Drawing on the Oxford English Corpus, the largest textual database of English, Butterfield analyzes the origin of vocabulary, the evolution of meanings and the real use of the language. The book explains how lexicographers decide which words to include in dictionaries and why we tend to use language in chunks, with examples such as «quintessentially American» or «quintessentially British».
The work describes James Murray's method in compiling the Oxford English Dictionary in the nineteenth century and contrasts it with the current computational analysis of the Oxford Corpus, which contains over two billion words.
Recommended for readers interested in etymology, how dictionaries work and the curiosities of contemporary English.
