‘And the KJB Begat Puns.’ My joke is easy, if not as clever as Crystal, but his book challenges one to make such puns on biblical phrases, especially when he asserts that phrases like ‘my yoke is easy’ are resistant to adaptation. Though he tips his hat to phrases we use without realising they are biblical, they fall by the wayside. His lesson is that the more playing there is with a phrase the more its deep influence on the English language is visible, and it is the play he loves most of all.

The result is a book which has insights and delights on every page. ‘Fly in the ointment’ gets a chapter to itself. Its origin, historical meaning, imagery and rhythm are all explored. Historic uses through to pop music titles are noted, and then the adaptations, as evidence that it had become an established idiom: in 2008 unused frequent flyer points produced this Australian headline, ‘Frequent fly in Qantas ointment’. It is fun to dip into such examples, stimulating to think about what makes the phrase effective, but reading the book whole is like eating a jar of boiled sweets whole: better to surf it than to surfeit (much punning is a weariness of the flesh).

To every joke there is a reason. Crystal's purpose is to test the truth of assertions about the KJB such as that ‘no book has had greater influence on the English language’. His question of how extensive its influence has been narrows to asking ‘how many expressions of biblical origin are part of present-day idiom?’. His answer is 257, perhaps much less than people might imagine from the generalisations which abound, but still impressive set against under a hundred from Shakespeare.

Secondary questions run throughout. Half the book works steadily through the Old Testament, asking how many phrases each book has supplied, and an appendix gives scores for all the books: Matthew supplies 60, the whole of the Apocrypha just one. Partly because the New Testament offers so many possible phrases, the other half usefully groups phrases by theme rather than book.

Crystal also asks how many phrases show specific influence of the KJB. Though he suggests that it had a role in the popularisation of most of the 257 phrases, he traces their origins and observes that only 18 are unique to the KJB. At times he writes as if there is a linguistic competition going on between the various translations but there was no contest: the KJB was so dominant in marketplace and consciousness that almost all biblical influence was filtered through it, regardless of whether it originated its phrases.

Here we enter the realm of cavils. The use of earlier versions is misleading. Culpably, instead of using the original Rheims-Douai, Crystal has used the very different Challoner revision from a century and a half later; less importantly, he asserts that only the KJB and Rheims-Douai include Ecclesiasticus. Occasionally the phrases he is tracing are in biblical headers – ‘the writing on the wall’ is in the Geneva Bible. Then there is the question of whether 257 is right. My own list of phrases has about 40 which he doesn't include, yet he has collected many more than I spotted. Instead let me offer a headline from today's paper in New Zealand as a candidate for inclusion in a later edition. It concerns the news that there are two identical Rugby World Cup trophies: ‘debate runneth over the dual Rugby World Cups’.

Sufficient unto the day be the cavils thereof. The major problem with Begat is that there is more which should be done. What was the English Bible's influence on English vocabulary? The first English dictionary (1604) was for ‘hard usual’ words which people ‘shall hear or read in Scriptures’: what words and meanings did the Bible give us? Why did eighteenth-century critics of the KJB's language find in it harsh, uncouth and obsolete words and phrases which are, to us, good and current English? Did the KJB act as a conservative influence on the English language, keeping its latinising tendency in check, helping to make respectable the ‘Teutonic rust’ (1724) of bygone ages? I hoped Begat would help with such questions.