How best to enjoy a book written by a linguist on the bastard origins of a language? Just read it. According to John McWhorter it’s about the linguistically incorrect. It's about letting the speaker speak and the writer write. While he does not implore writers to end sentences with a preposition, split infinitives with adjectives or begin a sentence with a conjunction, he does however; encourage the reader to relax his quandaries about new-word accumulations in English, over the centuries, up to the present day. Why? Because one thing is certain about all spoken languages, including English: it lives, it speaks to us and for us. It is also peculiar: it is a language of bastard, but known, origins. 

The educated really need know one thing: that the roots of English are Germanic. The Introduction of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue traces “three main rounds” of European invasions that led from Old English to Modern English. It began with the Danish and Norwegian Viking invasions (787 A.D. onward), Norman French invasions and the 100 years English-French war bringing Latin with it (remember that Latin was the language of the literate of medieval France). McWhorter is about unearthing the very old roots of English.

That is what makes this book such a treasure: the author reminds us of the training of the linguist chiefly: “how words are put together and how the way they are put together is different from how they were put together in the past” a.k.a. syntax.  However, his book bears a different stripe in that it reaches for something an anthropologist might master: etymology or the origin of words (and names).

His arguments are comforting if not convincing to some: there is no need to cut deadwood (or in this case dead words) from a living language. Like the stock market of yore, it should self-correct and discarded words will lose their value. But in a true sense, according to this book, there is really no such thing as penny stocks when it comes to playing loose with the lingo. Every newbie is both expected and welcomed. And the measure of its welcome will come in the form of its use.

The King’s English or Standard English has problems. It has additions, eccentricities and the occasional irregularity with verb conjugation that roll alongside its legitimate siblings. And that is perfectly fine. The author enjoins the everyday writer, linguist and anthropologist to write, talk and listen to English beast unencumbered. How? Because he has made it clear that English does not need fixing. Some linguists wear an “English is difficult” amulet. But the author pulls the chain on this idiom and replaces it with “English is easy.” And the once-archaic, as in Old English, becomes accessible. McWhorter truly makes the minutiae of English origins understandable to the non-linguist. In astrology this talent is termed ‘higher knowledge made plain.’ It is highly prized in the arts and sciences.

Chapter three: “We Speak a Battered Grammar” gets to the heart of the matter. McWhorter wrestles with the Viking role for the average speaker by asking who did what to English. He argues that it was the Vikings whodunit. And he uses a childhood anecdote about a rider who returns his bike with parts falling off to make his point:  

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