Changes

I have to go a roundabout way to introducing this book, so bear with me. It stems partly from dictionaries and the etymology of the language we use, but more so if anything from a different couple of books, and their ideas of generations. The authors of those posited the idea that all those archetypical generations – the Baby Boomers, the Millennials, and those before, in between and since – have their own cyclical pattern, and the history of humanity has been and will be formed by the interplay of just four different kinds, running (with only one exception) in regular order. I don't really hold much store by that, and I certainly didn't know we'd started one since the Millennials – who the heck decides such things, for one? ''Somebody must have put out an order'', as someone here says of something else. But in the same way as generations get defined by collective persons unknown, so do words – and those words are certainly a clue to what was important, predominant and of course spoken in each decade.

The thing is, that however readable the book may be – flowing through quite regularly and very well from one section of a chapter to another, and from one word to another – the picture is not complete at times. Take music – forever destined to define generations and their differences, and a subject that occurs quite often here. We go from the surprise that ''jazz'' was a baseball reference before it meandered to the music halls, but we then get ''swing'' and so on to ''rhythm and blues'' and ''rock and roll'', but there's more to it than that. F Scott Fitzgerald here mentions ''jungle music'' (and not in the Goldie definition) and there clearly is a different book that would track these passing histories more fully than we get here. It's as if nobody ever made the mistake of thinking ''LOL'' was for 'lots of love', an important error that should have been given space.