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The Aitch Factor

The Aitch Factor 1

Adventures in Australian English

by Susan Butler
Hardback
Publication Date: 01/08/2014
4/5 Rating 1 Review

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Living languages change all the time, but many of us wish they didn't.

For thirty years, Macquarie Dictionary editor Susan Butler has been in the front row watching Australians alternatively defend, reject, embrace and argue heatedly about every aspect of language usage. She has witnessed crusades against 'youse', ducked the missiles over the phrase 'man boobs', pondered the changing pronunciation of 'Beijing', recorded - controversially - the evolving meaning of 'misogyny' and wondered why on earth we still cling to the grammarian's flourish known as the apostrophe.

Drawing on her own depth of experience, community consultation and the odd letter of outrage, Butler chronicles her unique adventures with the wonderfully malleable but strangely resilient beast known as the English language, and pays particular attention to the way Australians have trained it to fit their circumstances.

Entertaining, insightful and occasionally irreverent, The Aitch Factor is the perfect book for word warriors, punctuation pedants and everyday lovers of language.

ISBN:
9781742612614
9781742612614
Category:
Language: reference & general
Format:
Hardback
Publication Date:
01-08-2014
Publisher:
Pan Macmillan Australia
Country of origin:
Australia
Pages:
300
Dimensions (mm):
206x137x25mm
Weight:
0.33kg

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The Aitch Factor by Susan Butler, a long-time editor of the Australian Macquarie Dictionary, contains a series of short essays about language, its history, development and idiosyncrasies.

Butler begins with the Haitch vs Aitch debate (my maternal grandmother in particular would have been horrified had I ever pronounced the letter H as 'Haitch') and goes on to explore other topics like Capitalisation, Internet gibberish, The attraction of slang and How do words get into the dictionary?

Butler is not without a sense of humour which these essays also reflect with subjects that include, Should man boobs be in the dictionary?, The mystery of the bogan, and her recommendation that we adopt Canadian spelling as an international standard over British or American English.

I was most impressed, and feel somewhat vindicated, to learn that Butler considers (and history proves) the apostrophe to be 'an artifice of writing, a grammarian's flourish' and actually advocates that we forgo it entirely given it is possible to do so without any effect on our comprehension of written language. Ive often thought its true, and shes right, isnt she?

An ideal gift for language lovers, or pedantics, grammar Nazi's or wordsmiths, The Aitch Factor is an entertaining and illuminating treatise on the ever evolving landscape of language.

Contains Spoilers No
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