9781439176696

English has fast become the number one language for everything from business and science, diplomacy and education, entertainment and environmentalism to socializing and beyondvirtually any human activity unfolding on a global scale. Worldwide, nonnative speakers of English now outnumber natives three to one; and in China alone, more people use English than in the United Statesa remarkable feat for a language that got its start as a mongrel tongue on an island fifteen hundred years ago.Through the fascinating stories of thirty English words used and understood in nearly all corners of the globe,The English Is Coming!takes readers on an eye-opening journey across culture and commerce, war and peace, and time and space. These mini-histories shed new light on everyday words: the strange turns of fate by which their meanings evolved and their new roles as the building blocks of the first language ever to forge a global community. Exploring such familiar terms asshampoo(from a Hindi word for scalp and body hygiene long practiced in India);robot(coined by Czech painter Josef Capek for his brother Karel's 1921 play about man-made creatures);credit(rooted in a prehistoric phrase of sacred significance: "to put heart into"); and dozens of others, Dunton-Downer reveals with clarity and humor how these linguistic artifacts embody the resilience, appeal, adoptability, and wild inclusiveness that English, through a series of historical accidents, gained on its road to worldwide reach. These words explain not only how English has managed to link our distant and often disparate pasts but also how it is propelling humankind to a future that we can, for the first time, talk about and shape in a language that now belongs to all of us: Global English.Perfect for culture buffs, armchair travelers, and language lovers alike,The English Is Coming!is sure to inspire truly global conversations for decades to come.

TERM	PRICE	DUE
SEMESTER	$14.15	Dec 13
QUARTER	$13.44	Aug 16
SHORT TERM	$12.73	Jul 03

Leslie Dunton-Downer earned a BA, with specialization in Ancient Greek, from Harvard, where she returned for a Ph.D. with distinction in Comparative Literature. Her graduate work focused on English and other languages and literatures of western medieval Europe. Dunton-Downer coauthored the acclaimed Essential Shakespeare Handbook and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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INTRODUCTION
Magic Glasses

Word-loving people seem to know who they are early in life. They’re the kids who find dictionaries at least as absorbing as children’s books. And instead of asking parents or teachers why the sky is blue, they ask why the sky is called blue.

Where I spent my first years, in Santa Cruz, California, the most alluring language was to be found in the colorful compound words that cropped up everywhere. At school, there were earthquake drills and field trips, say, to a classmate’s family strawberry farm. Our house sat in a redwood forest populated by bobcats, mushrooms, and what my German-speaking grandmother thrillingly referred to as Wildschweinen, “wild pigs,” disappointingly called “boar” in English. A family friend, Jack, had what he called his surfshop, a smelly but exciting beachside design lab of sorts, where he was working on a sharkproof rubber wet suit, striped to mimic a poisonous fish he said even sharks refused to bite. (Sharks, it turned out, weren’t fooled by Jack’s invention.) Then, in 1966, a new TV series certified that compounds were truly wonderful and could even be created from scratch. My little brother was mad for the superhero protagonist’s Batmobile and beguiling Batcave. For me, the show was all about Batlanguage.

These compounds were spellbinding verbal objects, two-part words that were so much more than the sums of their parts, equally satisfying to break down into their component pieces for closer examination and then put right back together. Some were easy to decipher, like earthquake, clearly what you get when the earth quakes, which it often did along the San Andreas Fault. Or redwood, obviously so named because the tree’s wood and bark were red. Or at least reddish. But others were more mysterious, like mushroom. What was the story here? Were mushrooms called that because they grew in rooms full of mush? Or because there was room for mush to gather in the gills on the underside of their caps? The dictionary said that mushroom came from the French mousseron. Impossible. I had learned from my French-speaking mother that mushroom was champignon in French. Now she was insisting that mousseron had to do with moss. But that didn’t answer my question. Besides, all I could hear in her mysterious French word was a hint of chocolate mousse.