As I explained in my first blog post about my planned third book, David Crystal’s book The Story of English in 100 Words inspired me to tackle this project, and studying his book is the first item on my research to-do list. Since then, I’ve gotten to work.

So far, reading The Story of English has been both discouraging and encouraging. Discouraging, because David Crystal knows more about English than I will ever know about Spanish. Each entry in the book is rich with information and presented in a most engaging manner. For example, the entry for the word and:

• quotes the first written example of the word;
• talks about the importance of “little words”;
• explains the origin of the ampersand (&);
• reveals an earlier abbreviation for and: a symbol that resembles the number 7 but that dips below the line of writing (like a j, q, or p) — this came as a complete surprise to me!
• thoroughly debunks the shibboleth against beginning sentences with and and other conjunctions, quoting grammarians both past and present and citing a host of authors who followed this practice.

I doubt that I’ll be able to do as good a job for Spanish as Crystal did for English, but I’ll try. In the meantime, I recommend The Story of English to any of my readers who are interested in languages in general, not just Spanish.

At the same time, reading The Story of English is encouraging. For one thing, I see how good a book of this type can be. Additionally, while I am still in the book’s early pages, it has already given me several ideas for my own book. For example, Crystal’s discussion of and suggests the following:

• I should include early written examples of the words when they are available and interesting. (See canoa in my earlier post.)
• I should include “little words”. Conmigo is on my list for sure — it’s a fascinating double compound, since both con- and -go came from Latin cum ‘with’, but centuries apart. I will probably mention mas when I talk about accent marks. Accented más, which means ‘more’, has eclipsed it in the last century and a half, as shown by the Google ngrams graph below. Por and para are also likely: para began as por + a ‘to’, which is why so many of its uses have a directional meaning.

• Regarding abbreviations, I’ll definitely cover the tilde’s origin as a shorthand for n (perhaps in an entry for año?), and the sexual politics of the arroba (@), an English abbreviation borrowed into politically correct Spanish. You can see the former in the letter from Christopher Columbus in my June 23 post, for example corazõ for corazón (two lines above canoas) and bãcos for bancos (one line below).
• The most obvious Spanish shibboleth is the shifting guidance either in favor of or against leísmo. Le is sure to be one of my 100 words.

As I mentioned above I’m still at the beginning of Cyrstal’s book, which is why this post is mostly about and. The book’s Introduction, besides providing a broad chronology of English and its principal lexical contributors, raises other useful points, all of which I will hope to cover in Spanish:

• Besides native words and borrowings, Crystal mentions several other sources of English words: de novo invention, slang and vulgar vocabulary, onomatopoeia, idioms, criminal jargon, and regionalisms.
• He also touches on vocabulary topics including standardization, the impact of printing, specific authors, biblical translations (including shibboleth, which is probably why it was on my mind), prescriptive grammar, and spelling reform — each topic grounded by one or words on his list.
• He covers different mechanisms of word formation that have come into play in the history of English, such as reduplication (dilly-dally), shortening, compounding, and proper nouns like valentine or Watergate becoming common nouns, for which the obvious Spanish example is biro.

Overall, Crystal characterizes English as “a playful and innovative language, whose speakers love to use their imaginations in creating new vocabulary.” I’m not ready to provide any parallel insight for Spanish, but I hope that soon I will be.