Inventing english. A Portable History of the Language

Аннотация

I grew up on a street full of languages. I heard Yiddish every day from my parents and grandparents and from the families of my friends. There was Italian around the corner, Cuban Spanish down the block, Russian in the recesses of the subway station. Some of my earliest memories are of their sounds. But there were also words of what seemed to be my own family’s making and that I have found in no dictionaries: konditterei, a strange blend of Yiddish and Italian calibrated to describe the self-im-portant café set; vachmalyavatet, a tongue-twister used to signify complete exhaustion; lachlat, a cross between a poncho and a peacoat that my father pointed out one afternoon.