Have you ever cringed while hearing someone mispronounce a word--or,
worse, been tripped up by a wily silent letter yourself? Consider
yourself lucky that you do not live in Victorian England, when the way
you pronounced a word was seen as a sometimes-damning index of who you
were and how you should be treated. No wonder then that jokes about
English usage provided one of Punch magazine's most fruitful veins of
humor for sixty years, from its first issue in 1841 to 1900.
For We Are Not Amused, renowned English-language expert David Crystal
has explored the most common pronunciation-related controversies during
the reign of Queen Victoria and brought together the cartoons and
articles that poked fun at them, adding insightful commentary on the
context of the times. The collection brings to light a society where
class distinctions ruled. Crystal explains why people felt so strongly
about accents and identifies which accents were the main sources of
jokes, from the dropped h's of the Cockney working class to the
upper-class tendency to drop the final g in words like "huntin'" and
"fishin'."
In this fascinating and highly entertaining book, Crystal shows that
outrage over proper pronunciation is nothing new--our feelings today
have their origins in the ways our Victorian predecessors thought about
the subject.
