I recently purchased an entertaining and informative series of 36 video lectures entitled, "The Secret Life of Words: English Words and Their Origins," from The Great Courses (TGC) online. The course lecturer is Anne Curzan, PhD, an award-winning Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan.
The following is a course description from TGC:
"COURSE DESCRIPTION
English is changing all around us. We see this in new words such as “bling” and “email,” and from the loss of old forms such as “shall.” It’s a human impulse to play with language and to create new words and meanings—but also to worry about the decay of language. Does text messaging signal the end of “pure English”? Why do teenagers pepper their sentences with “like” and “you know”?."
In the first lecture, Anne Curzan clearly defines English as having standard and nonstandard components. English words are often rich, colorful, powerful, and from foreign languages beyond Latin, Greek and German.
In our living English language, words are continually created, changed by usage, borrowed, or disinterred and reincarnated for modern use from the dead-word cemetery.
Googleganger, flexitarian, metrosexual, multislacker, recombobulation area, and Dracula sneeze are newly created words. 'Google' has changed from a noun to a verb, and 'fail' from a verb to a noun, as in 'epic fail.' We borrowed 'maven' from Yiddish and 'schadenfreude' from German. Luddite and vex have returned from shallow burials in the unused word pile.
If there is interest, I will summarize each lecture as I watch it, and we can kick around our thoughts in the 'Comments' section.
