JUST A PHRASE I’M GOING THROUGH:

MY LIFE IN LANGUAGE

David Crystal (Routledge, £14.99)

Humpty Dumpty, in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, introduces Alice to the idea that, when he uses a word, it means just what he chooses it to mean.

The question, as he puts it, is which is to be master – the word, or the person using the word.

And ‘Master of Words’ would be the perfect description for David Crystal, whose love of words and passion for linguistics has been with him since the cradle, more or less. Just a Phrase I’m Going Through is Crystal’s journey through a life in linguistics.

It’s autobiographical, of course, but also an idiosyncratic and intriguing introduction to language and its relations.

Everyone has an interest in language. Everyone has a favourite word, a pet hate, a story to tell about a particular word or name. And linguists are interested in hearing these stories – anything about words, about language, is fascinating.

For instance, when Crystal answered the phone to a woman trying to sell car insurance, he ended up having a 20-minute conversation about the woman’s name – Aniela – and its possible origins and meaning.

It was an interest in words that earned Crystal his harshest beating ever: he was asking the meaning of a word during a Latin lesson at school, run under the strict discipline of the Christian Brothers.

He studied Greek at school not because he chose it, but purely because of the class he was in (3 alpha); Latin and Greek combined turned him into an amateur philologist.

He went to University College, London, and immediately felt at home – as, indeed, he still does, in any university, anywhere in the world. He was lectured in phonetics by Randolph Quirk, had six months off in his third year with tuberculosis (his acting skills came in handy in the sanatorium), and sashayed into an academic life of language study.

Crystal became involved in the Survey of English Usage, in BBC Radio programmes, and was editor of the Cambridge Encyclopedia.

On the encyclopedia, his deadlines were constantly threatened by last-minute political, scientific and global changes such as Voyager 2 passing Neptune, the fall of the Berlin Wall and Margaret Thatcher’s resignation – not to mention a coup in the Soviet Union just before the second updated reprint.

As Crystal says, all encyclopedia editors want a quiet life – no changes, no deaths, no Nobel prizes, no revolutions or elections – especially not just before final-proof date.

But, of course, change is what makes life and language fascinating – for us ‘lay people’ as well as for professional linguists.

In his book, Crystal brings this enthusiasm to the fore through a well-balanced mixture of illuminating education and entertaining anecdote.