In this sequel to Blooming English, Kate Burridge continues her metaphor of the English language as garden, this time by examining its “weeds.” As any gardener will tell you, a weed is a plant which dares to grow where it's not wanted; by extension, Burridge's “weeds” are lexical and grammatical forms in English seen as unwanted by prescriptivists. However, just as one gardener's weed is another's beautiful wildflower, words with very positive connotations nowadays were once an insult reserved for the evil (e.g., wizard), and forms such as passives, which so annoy modern style manual writers, are plentiful in many of the greatest works of English literature. Like Burridge's previous volume, Weeds consists primarily of rewritten pieces she created for a radio program and these can be read in any order.

In her first chapter, “Introduction to the weedy traits of English,” Burridge expands upon her garden metaphor, likening spoken language to natural plant growth, and standard language to a bound and cultivated garden. She marvels at those who believe in “the possibility of a totally regular and homogeneous language system,” static and perfect; like most linguists, she knows that language is far too dynamic to be constrained for long. “Languages and gardens,” she comments, “are never finished products.” She follows with two chapters on lexical weeds: “The world of jargon, slang and euphemism” and “Word origins and meaning shifts.” In the former, she discusses the migration of special-group vocabulary into the general discourse, new back-formations in the media, and a number of interesting historical developments in euphemisms. In the last, she discusses how words can change meaning substantially over time, much to the dismay of many speakers.

In “Our grammatical weeds,” Burridge highlights several competing forms that muddle notions of correctness and even give native speakers pause. “Weeds in our sounds and spelling” traces how diachronic phonological change has left English with such a baffling orthography. In “The truly nasty weeds of the English language?” Burridge lays out her hit list of words and ways of speaking that she'd rather see fall by the wayside: words for mental illness and those who suffer it, political dissembling and Bureaucratese, and “advertising puffery.” Finally, in the last chapter, “W(h)ither our weeds?” she returns to her garden metaphor, concluding with excellent points such as “The facts of our existence are simply not that clear-cut. They're messy, and language has to reflect this.”

Both this book and its prequel would make delightful leisure reading for linguists and others who work with language, as well as excellent gifts for armchair logophiles in their acquaintance (doubly so if they happen to be gardeners!). The level of the writing is readily accessible to any educated layperson, and this would be a good recommendation for younger college and even high school students interested in language. Burridge's writing is both informative and entertaining, and her work comes highly recommended.