by Peter Silverton (Portobello, £14.99)
So, you are going to write a book about swearing. Do you try to be funny or not? Peter Silverton eschews the po face, and the aspect of his book whose appeal wears off most quickly is, inevitably, a running joke, which depends on not handling swearwords with quotation marks: "absolutely is being fucking fucked by fuck"; "Cunt's progress through the media has been slow and stuttering". (His nicest lines are casual asides: "Priests were then everywhere in Ireland, like bungalows.") This deliberate blurring of use and mention (until the final chapter) does enable the author to make a repeated compact point, however, as when he insists: "Englishmen had cocks long, long before they had penises." But this looks inconsistent with the confident assertion: "There's no difference between a bonk and a bang and a boff and a bone." Isn't there?
With likeable digressiveness, Silverton chases down etymologies, charts changing standards of taste (I enjoyed learning that the OED once considered "person" to be vulgar), investigates the meanings of "Your mum" or "pants", and parses distinctions of use ("Shite," he writes dreamily, sounds more "philosophical" than "shit"). He collects examples from other languages, too, though his French is iffy: "connard" is much stronger than "dickhead"; and "Elle a chaud au cul" does not mean "she's got a hot arse", but "she's feeling horny". The last few chapters (particularly those on swearing in pop music, and on racist epithets) are very good; it was hard anyway not to warm to a writer who could use an early footnote to exclaim: "What a wonderful word fuckwit is."
by Jeremy Butterfield (Oxford, £6.99)
This chatty introduction to linguistics often reads like an extended advertisement for the Oxford English Corpus, a 2bn-word electronic database of 21st-century usage. The book is inclined to overclaim about what the Corpus is good for: it can only show what people are actually doing, rather than settle usage debates or answer cultural-philosophical questions (the fact that "dog" is more common than "cat" in the Corpus is not exactly evidence, as the author proposes, that "dogs are man's best friend"). That said, Jeremy Butterfield has collected a genial gallimaufry of novelties ("chavlike", "floordrobe"), methods of word-formation, idioms (a Spanish person can be "as bored as an oyster"), grammar, and pet peeves of the "language police". The book also serves as a painless introduction to some major technical terms in linguistics (lemma, morpheme, collocation). The tone of tolerant curiosity is interrupted only by a sudden reference to "the egregious Ann Widdecombe", which even those who admire Widdecombe not a jot might find supererogatory.
Spilling the Beans on the Cat's Pyjamas
by Judy Parkinson (Michael O'Mara, £9.99)
Was "bish-bash-bosh" (cf Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney) really "a yuppie phrase, coined in the 1980s"? Let's ask the internet: oh, look, here is "the bish-bash-bosh of Freemasonry" in a 1924 novel, and a jazz number called "Bish Bash Bosh" recorded by Barry Harris in 1962. So the reader might be wary of trusting this lightweight, notes-free guide to "Popular Expressions", even before she is told that actors' "Break a leg!" is a "euphemism". It is hard to say what the point of the book is at all, when compared with a real reference work on idioms such as Brewer's. Judy Parkinson does, though, offer assurances that "A hornet is a type of large wasp", and that the expression "Past the sell-by date" originates with "perishable foods" in a supermarket, so perhaps the intended audience is non-Anglophones, or extraterrestrials.