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on English language standardization and then destandardization -- looks interesting:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/24/bo...=all&position=

Centuries of conquest, first by the Romans, later by the Norsemen and the French, created a highly adaptive, unusually absorptive language, and a scrambled linguistic map. For a time, after the Norman Conquest, England was a trilingual nation. The ruling class spoke Norman French, but most documents were written in Latin, and the indigenous population spoke Anglo-Saxon. This linguistic melting pot only grew richer with time. The English lexicon doubled in size during the early modern period, helped along by the printing press, the roving English maritime fleet and writers like Shakespeare, whose contribution Mr. Crystal examines in some detail. He concludes that it was far less than is often claimed (he cites a television commentator who asserted that "Shakespeare invented a quarter of our language"), but still miles ahead of the competition. There are about 2,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary that first appear in Shakespeare's works, as compared with 800 for the playwright and satirist Thomas Nashe, the second-place finisher in this competition. Mr. Crystal pauses a moment to shed a tear for such lost Nashisms as "bodgery" ("botched work"), "tongueman" ("good speaker") and "chatmate" ("person to gossip with").

I'm wondering whether "tongueman" really did mean "good speaker."