Weekend Stubble

Loyal readers will remember Alex MacBride: he was the UCLA linguistics grad student who, after seeing our hardcover edition of English as She is Spoke, contacted me with the first really convincing theory of how the disaster that is English came about. In a nutshell: Pedro Carolino probably hijacked Da Fonseca's perfectly decent Portuguese to French phrasebook and ran it ineptly through a French/English dictionary.

I just heard from Alex this week -- he's now a linguist at Google -- and he sends great news. Namely, Google's book digitizing project now has the original 1855 edition online.

Makes happy is! Make for you to run fasts to seeing excelling book!