David Wolman

Righting the Mother Tongue

From Olde English to Email, the Tangled Story of English Spelling. Sprache: Englisch.
kartoniert , 224 Seiten
ISBN 0061369268
EAN 9780061369261
Veröffentlicht April 2010
Verlag/Hersteller HarperCollins
18,00 inkl. MwSt.
Lieferbar innerhalb von 2 Wochen (Versand mit Deutscher Post/DHL)
Teilen
Beschreibung

When did ghost acquire its silent h? Will cyberspace kill the one in rhubarb? And was it really rocket scientists who invented spell-check?
In Righting the Mother Tongue, author David Wolman tells the cockamamie story of English spelling, by way of a wordly adventure from English battlefields to Google headquarters. Along the way, he joins spelling reformers picketing the national spelling bee, visits the town in Belgium--not England--where the first English books were printed, and takes a road trip with the boss at Merriam-Webster Inc. Wolman punctuates the journey with spelling wars waged by the likes of Samuel Johnson, Noah Webster, Theodore Roosevelt, and Andrew Carnegie.
Rich with history, pop culture, curiosity, and humor, Righting the Mother Tongue explores how English spelling came to be, traces efforts to mend the code, and imagines the shape of tomorrow's words.

Portrait

DAVID WOLMAN is a Contributing Editor at Outside. He has written for the Wired, the New York Times, New Yorker, Nature, and many other publications, and his work has been anthologized in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series. He is the author of The End of Money, Righting the Mother Tongue, and A Left-Hand Turn Around the World. David lives in Portland, Oregon, with his family.