The Fight for English

Hey, remember this post? It was about Japan and English. Well, on the vein of explaining English, One fantastic book I have found is this: The Fight for English: How Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left by David Crystal. It gives a perfectly succinct history on English and how, in trying to make it a legitimate language, we borrowed from most everyone we thought was cool, only to eventually make it all hard to understand and random. For example, I didn't know that we just added in Latin type spellings for words to show origins as an afterthought. It's a quick read, good for short trips or a lazy afternoon. I'm somewhat surprised I didn't study some of this in college.