In this ambitious book, Hughes extends and broadens
the projects of his two earlier books, Words in time:
A social history of the English vocabulary (1988),
and Swearing: A social history of foul language, oaths
and profanity in English (1991). The contents range
from summaries of events in the history of English to specialized
lexical studies; the work's real strength, as with
Hughes's two earlier books, lies in its investigations
of the English vocabulary. While moving in a generally
diachronic fashion from the origins of English to present-day
Englishes, Hughes devotes much of the book to snapshots
of the English lexis at various points and in various registers,
queries as to how these configurations came about, how
they affect other areas of the language, and why they matter
to speakers. The motivation for the book, and its great
accomplishment, is to show that the English lexis is a
rich historical repository. Chronological discussions can
be found elsewhere, but the treatments of moments in the
English lexis provided by Hughes form a special and engaging
contribution. As the book jacket states, Hughes interrogates
the vocabulary “as an indicator of social change
and as a symbol reflecting different social dynamics between
speech communities and models of dominance, cohabitation,
colonialism, and globalization.”