The Story of English is told in nine chapters
or "journeys" that show how English was taken from the villages of England,
Ireland, and Scotland to the settlements of the New World, how it was carried in slave
ships from West Africa to the plantations to the Caribbean and the Deep South, and how it
was scattered with the servants and soldiers of the British Empire to the farthest corners
of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, India, and the Far East. Robert
Burchfield, Editor in Chief of the Oxford Dictionaries says "The
study of the language will never be the same again after the publication of this book.
It travels at the speed of a bullet train to every corner of the globe where
English is spoken. It also authentically describes the mysterious power of older
dazzling forms of the language in past centuries." Professor
Randolph Quirk, Vice-Chancellor of the University of London, says
"This book manages to tell the story of English with masterly comprehensiveness,
remarkable clarity, and entertaining readability."
From the first chapter, An English-Speaking World,
. . . Between 1600 and the present, in armies, navies, companies and expeditions,
the speakers of English – including Scots, Irish, Welsh, American and many more
– traveled into every corner of the globe, carrying their language and culture with
them. Today, English is used by at least 750 million people, and barely half of
those speak it as a mother tongue. Some estimates have put that figure closer to one
billion. Whatever the total, English at the end of the twentieth century is more
widely scattered, more widely spoken and written, than any other language has ever been.
It has become the language of the planet, the first truly global language.
From Chapter Seven, Pioneers O Pioneers,
"GO WEST, YOUNG MAN! GO WEST!"
Go West was originally an Elizabethan expression meaning "to die" or,
like the sun, "to disappear into an unknown abyss." In the early days of
America, it was used to refer to the frontiersmen who went into Pennsylvania, Ohio and
Illinois and disappeared. Later, the American cowboy used the phrase gone west
to refer to someone who had deserted his family or left his job, usually in search of a
new and better start. The doughboys of the First World War used gone west
to describe a fellow soldier who went AWOL (absent without leave). Ironically, it
was the Hollywood cowboys who restored the phrase to its original Elizabethan sense of
"to die."
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