The Story Of Be: A Verb’s Eye Of The English Language, by David Crystal

If you love grammar and have a fondness for the history of the English language as well as regional dialects, this book has a lot to offer for it. Writers about English grammar can take a lot of suggestions from how this book approaches its subject and improve their own works. Here are some tips: Writers can afford to keep it short, as this book needs less than 200 pages to provide a comprehensive discussion of one of the most essential verbs in the English language, one with a fascinating and complex back story. Writers can keep it balanced, as this book manages to praise regional dialects and the variations of spelling and pronunciation as well as grammatical forms without seeking to score obvious political points, and is all the better for spending as much time praising forms of verbs that come from Cornwall and Yorkshire as they do from the accents of the Deep South and Caribbean black population. If the author takes more of a descriptivist approach than I would, at least he does the work of making that history compelling in describing the ways that to be has served a variety of functions–this is descriptivist history done right, and even someone who is generally more prescriptivist in terms of grammar can appreciate that. Here’s hoping that more authors do what this author does well, and we might have better and more informative books about the development and history of English grammar to show for it, with less fluff.

This book is a short one at about 175 pages or so, divided into 26 short chapters that indicate different uses of the English verb “to be”. The book begins with panels, a preface, and a discussion of the beginnings of the verb’s history that originally springs back to three separate words with their own contexts back in proto-Indo-European that English combines into one. This is followed by chapters on the existential be (1), obituarial be (2), temporal be (3), identifying be (4), obligational be (5), visitational be (6), circumstantial be (7), sexual be (8), numerical be (9), progressive be (10), perfective be (11), nominal be (12), signifying be (13), repetitive be (14), eventive be (15), lavatorial be (16), factual be (17), declarative be (18), quotative be (19), befalling be (20), membership be (21), chronological be (22), musical be (23), ludic be (24), missing be after deletation (25), and summarizing be (26). This is followed by an appendix of early English pronunciations of be, a list of illustrations from Punch that fill the book, publisher’s acknowledgements, and indices of names and subjects.

Although this book focuses mainly on the different uses of “to be” within the English language, it is worthwhile as well to comment on some other aspects of the book that make it entertaining. For one, the book is full of hilarious pictures that show grammar interacting with conversation in a lot of funny ways. A young nobleman tells off his governess by saying that his parents have the same terrible grammar that he does so obviously talking well doesn’t matter. Another great cartoon shows a grammatically-challenged young person telling his teacher that the teacher’s boyfriend ought to take care to ask her out to the movies more often, one of those subtle cuts that really get to the heart of the hazards of trying to quiz people about how to speak correctly. Besides the great cartoons, there are also a wide variety of poetic quotes that show the way that “to be” is used economically and beautifully by some of the English language’s greatest poets [1]. The end result is a fantastic book that really deserves to be read, as grammar and its history are far more entertaining and worthwhile than is often seen to be the case.

[1] There was no reference, alas, to the great American poet who found in the Spanish form of “to be” a way to elegantly express the suffering of life and the longing for peace in a short four-line rhyming epitaph, but as this poet is admittedly obscure, that can be forgiven.