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The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English
Words are essential to our everyday lives. An average person spends his or her day enveloped in conversations, e-mails, phone calls, text messages, directions, headlines, and more. But how often do we stop to think about the origins of the words we use? Have you ever thought about which words in English have been borrowed from Arabic, Dutch, or Portuguese? Try admiral , landscape, and marmalade, just for starters.
The Secret Life of Words is a wide-ranging account not only of the history of English language and vocabulary, but also of how words witness history, reflect social change, and remind us of our past. Henry Hitchings delves into the insatiable, ever-changing English language and reveals how and why it has absorbed words from more than 350 other languages—many originating from the most unlikely of places, such as shampoo from Hindi and kiosk from Turkish. From the Norman Conquest to the present day, Hitchings narrates the story of English as a living archive of our human experience. He uncovers the secrets behind everyday words and explores the surprising origins of our most commonplace expressions. The Secret Life of Words is a rich, lively celebration of the language and vocabulary that we too often take for granted.
The Secret Life of Words is a wide-ranging account not only of the history of English language and vocabulary, but also of how words witness history, reflect social change, and remind us of our past. Henry Hitchings delves into the insatiable, ever-changing English language and reveals how and why it has absorbed words from more than 350 other languages—many originating from the most unlikely of places, such as shampoo from Hindi and kiosk from Turkish. From the Norman Conquest to the present day, Hitchings narrates the story of English as a living archive of our human experience. He uncovers the secrets behind everyday words and explores the surprising origins of our most commonplace expressions. The Secret Life of Words is a rich, lively celebration of the language and vocabulary that we too often take for granted.
449 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2008
133 people are currently reading
1851 people want to read
About the author
Henry Hitchings
16 books37 followersHenry Hitchings is the author of The Language Wars, The Secret Life of Words, Who’s Afraid of Jane Austen?, and Defining the World. He has contributed to many newspapers and magazines and is the theater critic for the London Evening Standard.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 99 reviews
August 26, 2010
This should have been the perfect book for me - I'm a word lover, I love etymology, history, and social anthropology. Although I did enjoy reading it, I have to admit that I did have to force myself a bit to finish it. As many of the other reviews have noted, the book is exceedingly dry and has very little in the way of a narrative thread to connect the chapters. It feels more like a collection of articles in the same series, which becomes a bit tedious after a couple of hundred pages.
That said, I admit that my copy of this book is littered with dog-ears marking bits of interesting trivia or historical perspective. Many of the actual facts presented really are fascinating, I just wish they weren't presented as a series of facts.
Regarding the author's intellectually playful writing style, I can understand how it might irritate some readers, but I actually did enjoy it. Perhaps it's a bit of elitist pride showing through, but I admit that I did feel good about "getting it". There's a fine line between subtle ironic wordplay and eye-rolling punning, and I think Mr. Hitchings walked it pretty well.
Overall, I guess I'd say that I'm happier having read it than I was while actually reading it.
That said, I admit that my copy of this book is littered with dog-ears marking bits of interesting trivia or historical perspective. Many of the actual facts presented really are fascinating, I just wish they weren't presented as a series of facts.
Regarding the author's intellectually playful writing style, I can understand how it might irritate some readers, but I actually did enjoy it. Perhaps it's a bit of elitist pride showing through, but I admit that I did feel good about "getting it". There's a fine line between subtle ironic wordplay and eye-rolling punning, and I think Mr. Hitchings walked it pretty well.
Overall, I guess I'd say that I'm happier having read it than I was while actually reading it.
June 5, 2010
There are many ways to write human history. Most writers of history books tend to go the traditional way - following kings and queens, wars, revolutions and invasions. The history of the world is almost always written in military or political terms, and while that's certainly a valid way to do it, it's a little overdone. A truly creative historian might try to look at the progress of humankind through a different lens - the history of art, perhaps, or literature or science.
Hitchings has decided to look at history through the rise and spread of the English language - once an agglomeration of angry noises from a few small tribes in what would eventually become Europe, now a tongue that dominates the world. The English language is used by billions, studied by millions more. It's the language of business, commerce, politics, law, entertainment and news, and has spread like no other language before it.
The big question then becomes, How did this happen? How did English become what it has become? What is the history that led it to span the globe, and what qualities does it have that other languages don't? In this book, Hitchings looks at the history of English - and by extension the Western world - through the growth of its vocabulary. Where did our words come from, and what does their journey into English tell us about our own history?
A modern English speaker, equipped with a time machine, could probably go back about four or five hundred years and still be confident that she would be able to converse with people. Maybe not with perfect clarity, and it would be an entertaining thing to watch, but it would certainly be possible. Before that, the conventions and lexis that we are all so familiar with will start to be more and more scarce, and by the time of Chaucer, our time traveler would have a hard time indeed. So, as far as languages go, modern English is a fairly young tongue. Over the last half-millennium or so, the sheer number of words available to English speakers has exploded, mainly due to what some would call the language's "whorish" qualities - English will take up with any other language that comes along, accepting its words and making them its own. By following the spread of English, and the changes that it has made, we can see how people and cultures intermingled in the last thousand years or so.
Hitchings begins at, more or less, the beginning, with the Anglo-Saxon roots of English and its almost immediate conflicts with Norman French and the languages of the invading and pillaging Norsemen. He follows the political swings of English, as the rulers of the British Isles alternatingly embrace and shun the language, until it finally becomes the tongue that defines that tiny island on the edge of the North Atlantic. He looks into Arabic and Latin, Japanese and the languages of the Native Americans. We see the wellsprings of the language of food and music, science, military and law. He introduces us to words that came into English through long and winding roads (one of my favorites is Alcatraz - from the Spanish word for "pelican," which in turn comes from Arabic's al-qadus for "machine for drawing water," which is turn comes from Greek's kados, meaning "jar" - quite a journey for such a miserable place.) The history of the English language is a fractal history, meaning that in order to understand it you also have to understand the histories of a dozen other languages and then the languages that came before them. To try and put it all down on paper is a monumental task indeed.
The study of English words is fascinating, though. I have recently become enamored of the "Way With Words" podcast, which dedicates itself to unraveling questions about English usage. The hosts are funny and engaging, and manage to give a brief history of words and phrases and all the little tics of English that make you annoyed enough to have to call a radio show about it. It's a pleasure to listen to, which is probably why I listened to that show a whole lot more than I read this book.
Mr. Hitchings has done an admirable job with this book, trying to cover all the different avenues by which words came into English. The paths that they followed are fascinating, and the stories behind them are the stories of Western culture and civilization. The trouble is that Hitchings doesn't do all that good a job in making it interesting to the lay reader, i.e. me.
By and large, each chapter deals with a different source of vocabulary or a different time in history, but the narrative that he sets up tends to... wander about. There's no real narrative to focus on, and while I know this isn't supposed to be one, Hitchings is trying to tell us a story. It's a long and complicated one, but it's still a story, and as such needs to flow in order to keep the reader's attention.
I can't fault him for his research or his dedication, but I think he could have given more thought to the organization of the book. Instead of trying to cover as many sources as possible, perhaps he could have narrowed his focus. Instead of throwing out a dozen or so words at a time, he could have given us an in-depth narrative on just a few. Each chapter could probably have been expanded into its own book on the Arabic/Spanish/Latin/German/Greek/African origins of words, and so in reading it you get the feeling that there's so much more that he's glossing over. By trying to follow all the twisted paths of the history of English, it's very easy for the reader to get lost.
All I kept thinking as I read this was that I had much more fun reading Bill Bryson's book, Mother Tongue, which covers the same topic but is much more enjoyable to read, and perhaps that was my mistake. By the time I got to the end, and was more or less just scanning pages so that I could legitimately say I'd finished it, I realized that this is not the kind of book that you settle down with and read all the way through. It's a piecemeal book - pick it up, read a chapter, put it down and leave it alone for a while. When you're in the mood for more language history, pick it up again and read another chapter. Give yourself time to mull it over and digest, and finish it when you finish it.
However you decide to get through it, you will certainly have a greater appreciation for the richness and diversity of the English language, so regardless of how interesting it was narrative-wise, Hitchings has achieved his goal. English is an amazing language, and it behooves all its speakers to learn a little bit more about the amazing confluence of cultures that produced the sounds that you speak every day.
Hitchings has decided to look at history through the rise and spread of the English language - once an agglomeration of angry noises from a few small tribes in what would eventually become Europe, now a tongue that dominates the world. The English language is used by billions, studied by millions more. It's the language of business, commerce, politics, law, entertainment and news, and has spread like no other language before it.
The big question then becomes, How did this happen? How did English become what it has become? What is the history that led it to span the globe, and what qualities does it have that other languages don't? In this book, Hitchings looks at the history of English - and by extension the Western world - through the growth of its vocabulary. Where did our words come from, and what does their journey into English tell us about our own history?
A modern English speaker, equipped with a time machine, could probably go back about four or five hundred years and still be confident that she would be able to converse with people. Maybe not with perfect clarity, and it would be an entertaining thing to watch, but it would certainly be possible. Before that, the conventions and lexis that we are all so familiar with will start to be more and more scarce, and by the time of Chaucer, our time traveler would have a hard time indeed. So, as far as languages go, modern English is a fairly young tongue. Over the last half-millennium or so, the sheer number of words available to English speakers has exploded, mainly due to what some would call the language's "whorish" qualities - English will take up with any other language that comes along, accepting its words and making them its own. By following the spread of English, and the changes that it has made, we can see how people and cultures intermingled in the last thousand years or so.
Hitchings begins at, more or less, the beginning, with the Anglo-Saxon roots of English and its almost immediate conflicts with Norman French and the languages of the invading and pillaging Norsemen. He follows the political swings of English, as the rulers of the British Isles alternatingly embrace and shun the language, until it finally becomes the tongue that defines that tiny island on the edge of the North Atlantic. He looks into Arabic and Latin, Japanese and the languages of the Native Americans. We see the wellsprings of the language of food and music, science, military and law. He introduces us to words that came into English through long and winding roads (one of my favorites is Alcatraz - from the Spanish word for "pelican," which in turn comes from Arabic's al-qadus for "machine for drawing water," which is turn comes from Greek's kados, meaning "jar" - quite a journey for such a miserable place.) The history of the English language is a fractal history, meaning that in order to understand it you also have to understand the histories of a dozen other languages and then the languages that came before them. To try and put it all down on paper is a monumental task indeed.
The study of English words is fascinating, though. I have recently become enamored of the "Way With Words" podcast, which dedicates itself to unraveling questions about English usage. The hosts are funny and engaging, and manage to give a brief history of words and phrases and all the little tics of English that make you annoyed enough to have to call a radio show about it. It's a pleasure to listen to, which is probably why I listened to that show a whole lot more than I read this book.
Mr. Hitchings has done an admirable job with this book, trying to cover all the different avenues by which words came into English. The paths that they followed are fascinating, and the stories behind them are the stories of Western culture and civilization. The trouble is that Hitchings doesn't do all that good a job in making it interesting to the lay reader, i.e. me.
By and large, each chapter deals with a different source of vocabulary or a different time in history, but the narrative that he sets up tends to... wander about. There's no real narrative to focus on, and while I know this isn't supposed to be one, Hitchings is trying to tell us a story. It's a long and complicated one, but it's still a story, and as such needs to flow in order to keep the reader's attention.
I can't fault him for his research or his dedication, but I think he could have given more thought to the organization of the book. Instead of trying to cover as many sources as possible, perhaps he could have narrowed his focus. Instead of throwing out a dozen or so words at a time, he could have given us an in-depth narrative on just a few. Each chapter could probably have been expanded into its own book on the Arabic/Spanish/Latin/German/Greek/African origins of words, and so in reading it you get the feeling that there's so much more that he's glossing over. By trying to follow all the twisted paths of the history of English, it's very easy for the reader to get lost.
All I kept thinking as I read this was that I had much more fun reading Bill Bryson's book, Mother Tongue, which covers the same topic but is much more enjoyable to read, and perhaps that was my mistake. By the time I got to the end, and was more or less just scanning pages so that I could legitimately say I'd finished it, I realized that this is not the kind of book that you settle down with and read all the way through. It's a piecemeal book - pick it up, read a chapter, put it down and leave it alone for a while. When you're in the mood for more language history, pick it up again and read another chapter. Give yourself time to mull it over and digest, and finish it when you finish it.
However you decide to get through it, you will certainly have a greater appreciation for the richness and diversity of the English language, so regardless of how interesting it was narrative-wise, Hitchings has achieved his goal. English is an amazing language, and it behooves all its speakers to learn a little bit more about the amazing confluence of cultures that produced the sounds that you speak every day.
September 10, 2014
The book is very boring . It only tells us something about words . As you know , remembering words is the most uninteresting thing . I hate remembering words and anything about words . The dull book lacks interest!
March 28, 2013
These days, it is common to lament the spread and dominance of English, the way its uncouth touch corrupts and infects other languages. Yet it’s no secret that English is a prolific thief when it comes to words. Henry Hitchings explores this phenomenon in The Secret Life of Words, where he examines how the encounters between people who speak English and people who speak other languages have shaped and influenced English over its long history. Along the way, he spouts a veritable fountain of words cribbed from abroad. Thanks to those years of French class, I knew that souvenir is from French, and I was even aware that swastika comes to us via Hindi. But I didn’t know that gambit is from Italian, mattress from Arabic, and nephew is a Norman alternative to the Saxon brothorsunu. I also discovered while reading that totem, a word we Canadians might associate more with the totem poles of British Columbia, is actually from Ojibwe, a people closer to my neck of the woods. Hitchings also makes the connection between bikini the swimsuit and the Bikini Atoll. (Interestingly, he doesn’t delve further to explain that the island takes its name from the Marshallese pikini for “coconut place”. I had to visit Wikipedia for that tidbit.)
I discovered this book by accident. I was actually checking to see if Suffolk Libraries had a copy of The Secret History of the English Language , by M.J. Harper, and it offered me this instead. “Sure, why not?” I thought, and I placed my reservation. Well, it’s been an interesting but ambivalent read. On one hand, The Secret Life of Words is a very comprehensive yet detailled look at loanwords in the English language. On the other hand, it is a frustratingly verbose and unstructured compilation.
I am amazed and awestruck by the amount of research Hitchings must have done to prepare this text. He acknowledges his debt to The Oxford English Dictionary, my favourite dictionary and indubitably an invaluable resource in such an endeavour. Yet the sheer breadth of historical and linguistic topics covered here guarantee that Hitchings must have consulted hundreds of articles, papers, books, and oracles. And his organization and note-taking skills must be impressive. After reading this book, there is no way I can remember even a quarter of the etymologies he presents here; he has either a superhuman memory or an extremely efficient filing system….
Whatever the causes, the results are worth it. In every chapter, Hitchings provides a positively delectable feast of words. Starting with a broad historical summary of the events and movements relevant to that chapter, Hitchings slowly transitions into looking at specific words acquired by English during that period. This ramps up into more, longer lists of words, lists so fluid and euphonious that it’s impossible not to slow down and feel the words roll off the tip of your tongue as your eyes scan over them. English owes such a debt to other languages, not to mention the expansionist and colonialist efforts of the British that drove our contact and interaction with the speakers of those languages.
And so we go through history. From the Roman occupation and withdrawal from Britain to the Anglo/Saxon/Jute/Pictish invasion to the Danes and the Normans, Hitchings explores how Old English developed in the crucible of the British Isles. Of particular interest was the observation that English began to care about word order and less about inflection as it rubbed shoulders with Norse. I found that fascinating! He goes on to look at the Norman role in Old English’s transformation to Middle English, which naturally provides a springboard for talking about Chaucer. (Shakespeare is a recurring thread throughout the book, but Hitchings does not actually give him much in the way of his own section, curiously enough. He acts instead as a touchstone, his plays offering a kind of referent for Hitchings to use to note how certain words were used in the sixteenth century.) Later chapters follow Britain’s expansion into the New World, Africa, and India.
Hitchings makes the perhaps obvious, nonetheless important connection between politics and language. Political ideologies and aspirations shape a language—certain words come into or fall out of favour based on the government in power. (This reminded me a lot of Orwell’s musings on how politics will shape a language, which recurs throughout his novels and is explicitly articulated in Homage to Catalonia .) Similarly, English has at times embraced the words of another language even as the English have worked to eradicate or suppress that language and its people (after all, having a distinct language is just one step away from having a distinct identity, and we can’t have that, can we?). This puts us in the unenviable position of having a language enriched by conquest. (English is by no means alone in this, of course.)
The Secret Life of Words contains a wealth of information, so much that it is overwhelming. Even a single chapter is dense with those lists of loanwords I mentioned above. Now try 16 chapters of that! Each chapter theoretically covers English’s interaction with another language, with a strong historical component included for context. Actually, I found the history portion of every chapter far more interesting than the part that was mostly lists. Each new loanword is, by itself, a novelty. But I’m not going to remember them all, and presented like this in quick succession, they leave my head as quickly as they enter, prompting me to ask, “What’s the point?”
There is also little continuity or connection between chapters. The lack of an introduction or conclusion chapter makes this evident. I don’t require my non-fiction to have a narrative. However, it would have been nice if Hitchings had employed some larger themes tie everything together. Instead, each chapter is interesting in its own right, but altogether the book is more of a strange smorgasbord than a satisfying, multi-course meal.
I’m not sure I would recommend this book. I don’t not recommend it. I urge those who would undertake it to dive and dip into a chapter at a time rather than trying to devour it in a single, sustained stretch. (I can’t help it; the latter way is just how I tend to read!) This might make it easier to enjoy The Secret Life of Words. As it is, I can admire this book, but it isn’t as entertaining as I want my non-fiction to be.
I discovered this book by accident. I was actually checking to see if Suffolk Libraries had a copy of The Secret History of the English Language , by M.J. Harper, and it offered me this instead. “Sure, why not?” I thought, and I placed my reservation. Well, it’s been an interesting but ambivalent read. On one hand, The Secret Life of Words is a very comprehensive yet detailled look at loanwords in the English language. On the other hand, it is a frustratingly verbose and unstructured compilation.
I am amazed and awestruck by the amount of research Hitchings must have done to prepare this text. He acknowledges his debt to The Oxford English Dictionary, my favourite dictionary and indubitably an invaluable resource in such an endeavour. Yet the sheer breadth of historical and linguistic topics covered here guarantee that Hitchings must have consulted hundreds of articles, papers, books, and oracles. And his organization and note-taking skills must be impressive. After reading this book, there is no way I can remember even a quarter of the etymologies he presents here; he has either a superhuman memory or an extremely efficient filing system….
Whatever the causes, the results are worth it. In every chapter, Hitchings provides a positively delectable feast of words. Starting with a broad historical summary of the events and movements relevant to that chapter, Hitchings slowly transitions into looking at specific words acquired by English during that period. This ramps up into more, longer lists of words, lists so fluid and euphonious that it’s impossible not to slow down and feel the words roll off the tip of your tongue as your eyes scan over them. English owes such a debt to other languages, not to mention the expansionist and colonialist efforts of the British that drove our contact and interaction with the speakers of those languages.
And so we go through history. From the Roman occupation and withdrawal from Britain to the Anglo/Saxon/Jute/Pictish invasion to the Danes and the Normans, Hitchings explores how Old English developed in the crucible of the British Isles. Of particular interest was the observation that English began to care about word order and less about inflection as it rubbed shoulders with Norse. I found that fascinating! He goes on to look at the Norman role in Old English’s transformation to Middle English, which naturally provides a springboard for talking about Chaucer. (Shakespeare is a recurring thread throughout the book, but Hitchings does not actually give him much in the way of his own section, curiously enough. He acts instead as a touchstone, his plays offering a kind of referent for Hitchings to use to note how certain words were used in the sixteenth century.) Later chapters follow Britain’s expansion into the New World, Africa, and India.
Hitchings makes the perhaps obvious, nonetheless important connection between politics and language. Political ideologies and aspirations shape a language—certain words come into or fall out of favour based on the government in power. (This reminded me a lot of Orwell’s musings on how politics will shape a language, which recurs throughout his novels and is explicitly articulated in Homage to Catalonia .) Similarly, English has at times embraced the words of another language even as the English have worked to eradicate or suppress that language and its people (after all, having a distinct language is just one step away from having a distinct identity, and we can’t have that, can we?). This puts us in the unenviable position of having a language enriched by conquest. (English is by no means alone in this, of course.)
The Secret Life of Words contains a wealth of information, so much that it is overwhelming. Even a single chapter is dense with those lists of loanwords I mentioned above. Now try 16 chapters of that! Each chapter theoretically covers English’s interaction with another language, with a strong historical component included for context. Actually, I found the history portion of every chapter far more interesting than the part that was mostly lists. Each new loanword is, by itself, a novelty. But I’m not going to remember them all, and presented like this in quick succession, they leave my head as quickly as they enter, prompting me to ask, “What’s the point?”
There is also little continuity or connection between chapters. The lack of an introduction or conclusion chapter makes this evident. I don’t require my non-fiction to have a narrative. However, it would have been nice if Hitchings had employed some larger themes tie everything together. Instead, each chapter is interesting in its own right, but altogether the book is more of a strange smorgasbord than a satisfying, multi-course meal.
I’m not sure I would recommend this book. I don’t not recommend it. I urge those who would undertake it to dive and dip into a chapter at a time rather than trying to devour it in a single, sustained stretch. (I can’t help it; the latter way is just how I tend to read!) This might make it easier to enjoy The Secret Life of Words. As it is, I can admire this book, but it isn’t as entertaining as I want my non-fiction to be.
August 28, 2017
I'll leave my original summation below for anyone who feels the same after chapter 4.
1 Star off for really long, unstoppable chapters.
1 Star off for TOTALLY IGNORING IRELAND, YOU ASSHAT. We were relevant in every single damn bloody chapter!!!!!
...*breathe*...
he is an idiot who has not realised that Ireland had actually separated from the UK for a long time, and didn't actually enjoy the joining while we WERE joined....
Or that we have our own minority language from which much borrowing has occurred.
.....I actually felt a bit sorry for him in the end, because we could all get together with him for tea in London, and then all start talking to each other in one of our country's other languages, and he will just never get it.
And more, the DAMAGE English caused, forcing our language off us or BOOM, penal laws. He knows nothing of it! This is a starry-eyed, nostalgic catalogue of how poor Brits found themselves ended up here.
I don't want to be mad, but I am LOYALLY mad. Bill Bryson knows much more about the effect Irish had on English.
This book was more a badly laid out timeline dictionary of how, where and when words entered England English. And that part WAS interesting. But I would prefer the layout fixed as a list, and a note to say that they're purposely excluding Ireland (in favour of India, Japan, African countries, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Russia, Australia, HAWAIIAN, BECAUSE IT'S HAD SUCH A MASSIVE INFLUENCE... etcetera.)
----old review----
OMG, this is really hard to read.
Some of it IS really interesting, but it's killer trying to get through it. There aren't even any breaks within the chapters so you can take a breather and still know where you left off. Chapters are pages and pages of long historical facts - that ARE interesting, like I said, but just don't give you a chance to absorb anything...
1 Star off for really long, unstoppable chapters.
1 Star off for TOTALLY IGNORING IRELAND, YOU ASSHAT. We were relevant in every single damn bloody chapter!!!!!
...*breathe*...
he is an idiot who has not realised that Ireland had actually separated from the UK for a long time, and didn't actually enjoy the joining while we WERE joined....
Or that we have our own minority language from which much borrowing has occurred.
.....I actually felt a bit sorry for him in the end, because we could all get together with him for tea in London, and then all start talking to each other in one of our country's other languages, and he will just never get it.
And more, the DAMAGE English caused, forcing our language off us or BOOM, penal laws. He knows nothing of it! This is a starry-eyed, nostalgic catalogue of how poor Brits found themselves ended up here.
I don't want to be mad, but I am LOYALLY mad. Bill Bryson knows much more about the effect Irish had on English.
This book was more a badly laid out timeline dictionary of how, where and when words entered England English. And that part WAS interesting. But I would prefer the layout fixed as a list, and a note to say that they're purposely excluding Ireland (in favour of India, Japan, African countries, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Russia, Australia, HAWAIIAN, BECAUSE IT'S HAD SUCH A MASSIVE INFLUENCE... etcetera.)
----old review----
OMG, this is really hard to read.
Some of it IS really interesting, but it's killer trying to get through it. There aren't even any breaks within the chapters so you can take a breather and still know where you left off. Chapters are pages and pages of long historical facts - that ARE interesting, like I said, but just don't give you a chance to absorb anything...
May 11, 2009
I tried.
I really did.
I wanted to like this book so badly. This seemed like the kind of book that would be right up my alley: history, literature, linguistics, fascinating minutiae about word origins and meanings. Exactly the kind of book I love.
But it was a battle to finish it.
It was difficult to find any through narrative in each chapter. It seemed like the author had discovered all of this interesting information during the course of his research and couldn't bear not to include a single piece of it. So it all got shoehorned into whichever chapter it fit most closely. Paragraphs often seemed completely disjointed from the ones directly before and after.
Perhaps shorter chapters would have been easier to follow or at least keep up with. A little more editing for relevance to the chapter's theme would have been helpful. There were some great nuggets of insight buried in this book, but I felt they were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information included.
For more book reviews, visit my blog, Build Enough Bookshelves.
I really did.
I wanted to like this book so badly. This seemed like the kind of book that would be right up my alley: history, literature, linguistics, fascinating minutiae about word origins and meanings. Exactly the kind of book I love.
But it was a battle to finish it.
It was difficult to find any through narrative in each chapter. It seemed like the author had discovered all of this interesting information during the course of his research and couldn't bear not to include a single piece of it. So it all got shoehorned into whichever chapter it fit most closely. Paragraphs often seemed completely disjointed from the ones directly before and after.
Perhaps shorter chapters would have been easier to follow or at least keep up with. A little more editing for relevance to the chapter's theme would have been helpful. There were some great nuggets of insight buried in this book, but I felt they were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information included.
For more book reviews, visit my blog, Build Enough Bookshelves.
July 30, 2012
This book probably deserved less than four stars ,but I found it to be such a rich feast of information that I had to give it that extra star. I agree with the other reviewers that the book itself does not hang together. The author has a very digressive style and goes off on many tangents ,but I have a soft spot for books like that. I am curious to read his other "The Language Wars"
February 13, 2009
Laborous feat but some interesting facts, the word nicotine stems from the French Ambassador on 1561 Jean Nicot when he brought tobacco back to Europe to help someone alleviate a migrane. Fun stuff!
February 18, 2009
Meh. There was no narrative. Each chapter was a collection of words and how they came about. References were neither superficial enough that themes and trends emerged nor deep enough that really neat nuggets emerged. I only made it about 250 pages into the book before going "what's the point?" and realizing I couldn't remember much of what was gone over. The information was poorly presented and some lists, section headers, cross references and references to deeper works except for some absolutely Byzantine reading suggestions.
January 31, 2012
A very satisfying read; educational, interesting and humourous, this book appealed to me because of my interest in the English language and teaching it. But it was much more than another history of the English language; it is a very wide and deep examination of events and trends (ancient and contemporary) that has led to the evolution of our language to the global powerhouse it is today, and continues to be. This book will add to any reader's appreciation of the English language (ALL the Englishes) and it's wonderful journey in time and space. Recommended.
September 19, 2011
Getting pummeled with fun facts but pacing plods sometimes.
July 10, 2013
Great book for those who are interested in linguistics.
November 13, 2021
Loved this book – amazing research. Often stating the obvious, but we hadn’t thought about it till delivered to us readymade. History is embedded in words. For example, words like sheep, pig and deer metamorphose into mutton, pork and venison as we become more civilised. And when the words go out of fashion or whatever they refer to is no longer extant, we lose them, and their associated history. Robert McFarlane made just this point in his recent The Lost Words, in which he laments the removal from childrens’ dictionaries of many words representing the natural world he delighted in growing up in, such as acorn, bluebell and kingfisher.
An alternative title for Hitching’s book could be The Evolution of English. Just like looking at a cliff face where all the variants of Darwinian evolution are visible, words tell us about the history of the human world.
In 1604, the first monolingual English dictionary was published. Shakespeare added 1700 words to that. The Italian renaissance period was the busiest ever in new words being borrowed from other cultures, with art, music and food being the biggest contributors.
Words often start their lives as a description of things, their “thingness” and evolve into compound words …thus beach ball, motor cycle. This is not unlike placenames which are descriptive of the topography they are representing. Such is why in Wales so many places have the Welsh cym, du and Llan – valley, black and townland – in them.
In the USA, the Puritan prohibition on profanities led to rather muted alternatives such as doggone, gee whiz and drat. When the first American dictionary was published by Noah Webster much of what had proceeded as English spelling was streamlined and hence we had check replace cheque, music for musick, color for colour and labor for labour.
Much of how language evolved is still embedded in our culture. Latin had been the language of intellectuals in the middle ages , utilised in statehood, medicine and science. It was a way of claiming high moral status, with the corrollory of those who spoke in the vernacular tongue – and there was many vernacular tongues throughout the UK and Ireland – were accorded low moral status. This is where we find the origins of racism; a good example is how the Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral portrays people from the East as monsters and malformed. In the absence of any other representation, hardly surprising that such imagery took root in the public imagination, all ready to become the justification for colonialism and imperialism and the civilisation mission sold to the public.
All in all, a fascinating book, a fairly easy read and just about non-put-downable.
An alternative title for Hitching’s book could be The Evolution of English. Just like looking at a cliff face where all the variants of Darwinian evolution are visible, words tell us about the history of the human world.
In 1604, the first monolingual English dictionary was published. Shakespeare added 1700 words to that. The Italian renaissance period was the busiest ever in new words being borrowed from other cultures, with art, music and food being the biggest contributors.
Words often start their lives as a description of things, their “thingness” and evolve into compound words …thus beach ball, motor cycle. This is not unlike placenames which are descriptive of the topography they are representing. Such is why in Wales so many places have the Welsh cym, du and Llan – valley, black and townland – in them.
In the USA, the Puritan prohibition on profanities led to rather muted alternatives such as doggone, gee whiz and drat. When the first American dictionary was published by Noah Webster much of what had proceeded as English spelling was streamlined and hence we had check replace cheque, music for musick, color for colour and labor for labour.
Much of how language evolved is still embedded in our culture. Latin had been the language of intellectuals in the middle ages , utilised in statehood, medicine and science. It was a way of claiming high moral status, with the corrollory of those who spoke in the vernacular tongue – and there was many vernacular tongues throughout the UK and Ireland – were accorded low moral status. This is where we find the origins of racism; a good example is how the Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral portrays people from the East as monsters and malformed. In the absence of any other representation, hardly surprising that such imagery took root in the public imagination, all ready to become the justification for colonialism and imperialism and the civilisation mission sold to the public.
All in all, a fascinating book, a fairly easy read and just about non-put-downable.
May 17, 2020
If you’ve read one of Hitchings’ books, you’ve read them all. But also if you’ve read one of Hitchings books, you need to read them all, because you’re a helpless, desperate nerd and Hitchings is one of a very few writers working the cloistered, insular, über-niche pop-etymology-cum-lexicography beat. His previous two books – about the publication of Dr. Johnson’s dictionary and the history of English usage debates, respectively – is exactly the kind of breezy, academically inflected stuff I look for when I want something fun, and so I expected The Secret Life of Words to be a sure-thing, which, you can already tell from how I’m setting this up, it wasn’t. Writing about etymologies, as Dan Jurafsky surely knows, is not really the same as writing about, for instance, a person’s life, or even a book’s life, since the “story” is as long as a couple of sentences. E.g., “coconut,” it turns out, comes to English from the Portuguese, who, upon first seeing the nut, likened its dotted top to a grimacing face, the term for which is “coco” in Portuguese. End of story; next word. Now, because I’m a desperate nerd, I find this fascinating, but this is hardly the making for a narrative spine strong enough to sustain (let me see here) a four hundred forty-page book. In order to gather this thing together into something workable, Hitchings attempts to convey the history of English through its periods of borrowing, and so dips in and out of etymologies between explanations of world events and trends that led to further borrowing. Ultimately, I found this superficial imposition of structure to be unconvincing at first, wherefrom it developed into tediousness. There are a thousand new mini-stories packed in here that Hitchings does an admirable job attempting to cohere, and so is worth reading if you just have to get your fix, but I’m not convinced you wouldn’t be better off reading an etymological dictionary.
September 10, 2025
Catnip for word nerds.
August 11, 2016
Hitchings had my heart the moment he quoted John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure.
It's excellent fun, but it is slow going. Not because it's dull, but because there's so much interesting material stuffed into each paragraph, and I needed time to absorb it. I had a similar reaction to Margaret Visser's The Rituals of Dinner, another marvelous book jam-crammed full of thought-provoking material; the difference was that a lot of Visser's information was new to me, while I know a bit more about English.
Some folks have complained about the lack of a clear narrative, which I think is a bit unfair. There is one; it's just a bit broad, in that it's the whole history of the English language, going back to the various invasions of Britain and the ensuing linguistic mixings of Anglo-Saxon, Latin, French, Scandinavian, etc.
I liked Hitchings' description of the way these mixtures resonate today: "Often we have three terms for the same thing--one Anglo-Saxon, one French, and one clearly absorbed from Latin or Greek. The Anglo-Saxon word is typically a neutral one; the French word connotes sophistication; and the Latin or Greek word, learnt from a written text rather than from human contact, is comparatively abstract and conveys a more scientific notion." He goes on to list "go, depart, and exit" as examples, which works pretty well.
Hitchings also emphasizes the long history of people complaining about the decline of English, which I always find both comforting and amusing. Having grown up in a deeply prescriptivist home, it's reassuring to encounter folks who say (and can prove) that people have been whinging about the decline of the English for hundreds of years; there were no "good old days," as it were, so it's okay to relax a bit (Jack Lynch does much the same thing in The Lexicographer's Dilemma: The Evolution of "Proper" English, from Shakespeare to South Park).
I also appreciated the occasional asides. I smiled when, in discussing British travel guides of the nineteenth century, Hitchings quoted one as advising people "not to attempt sentences; but pronounce boldly and baldly the one or two words which mainly imply the meaning"--and then promptly added, "No change there, then."
He even provides the tiniest glimpse of his more personal tastes; in explaining how the Yiddish zaftig "tends to be used of voluptuous women," he adds, rather tartly, "and thus increasingly of any woman who doesn't resemble a matchstick."
It's excellent fun, but it is slow going. Not because it's dull, but because there's so much interesting material stuffed into each paragraph, and I needed time to absorb it. I had a similar reaction to Margaret Visser's The Rituals of Dinner, another marvelous book jam-crammed full of thought-provoking material; the difference was that a lot of Visser's information was new to me, while I know a bit more about English.
Some folks have complained about the lack of a clear narrative, which I think is a bit unfair. There is one; it's just a bit broad, in that it's the whole history of the English language, going back to the various invasions of Britain and the ensuing linguistic mixings of Anglo-Saxon, Latin, French, Scandinavian, etc.
I liked Hitchings' description of the way these mixtures resonate today: "Often we have three terms for the same thing--one Anglo-Saxon, one French, and one clearly absorbed from Latin or Greek. The Anglo-Saxon word is typically a neutral one; the French word connotes sophistication; and the Latin or Greek word, learnt from a written text rather than from human contact, is comparatively abstract and conveys a more scientific notion." He goes on to list "go, depart, and exit" as examples, which works pretty well.
Hitchings also emphasizes the long history of people complaining about the decline of English, which I always find both comforting and amusing. Having grown up in a deeply prescriptivist home, it's reassuring to encounter folks who say (and can prove) that people have been whinging about the decline of the English for hundreds of years; there were no "good old days," as it were, so it's okay to relax a bit (Jack Lynch does much the same thing in The Lexicographer's Dilemma: The Evolution of "Proper" English, from Shakespeare to South Park).
I also appreciated the occasional asides. I smiled when, in discussing British travel guides of the nineteenth century, Hitchings quoted one as advising people "not to attempt sentences; but pronounce boldly and baldly the one or two words which mainly imply the meaning"--and then promptly added, "No change there, then."
He even provides the tiniest glimpse of his more personal tastes; in explaining how the Yiddish zaftig "tends to be used of voluptuous women," he adds, rather tartly, "and thus increasingly of any woman who doesn't resemble a matchstick."
November 27, 2014
This book is a history of English and also of England: the chapters are titled by a word first used in each period, from the Norman times (Invade) to the 20th century (Angst), via the Chaucerian era of scholarship (Volume), the Elizabethan age of exploration (Bravado) and Jacobean epoch of conquering (Powwow), the Civil war (Onslaught) and the Enlightenment (Connoisseur), the age of expansion and imperialism (Teapot) and the Victorian times (Ethos). It's also an account of writing things down, along with the perennial attendant arguments about plain versus flowery language. The author is always entertaining and never dry, although he never explains why something that is standing still, and paper, pens etc are a homophone.
Hitchings claims that new vocabulary introduced into the old language reflects the concerns of the incomers, his example being Norman words for law and bureaucracy becoming prevalent in English from 1066 onwards. New meanings for words also exacerbated divisions between the ruling Normans and the Saxon underclass:- “knave” was just a way of describing a young man until William the Bastard and his chums came along. However, words meaning the same thing in French and English languages were sometimes used alongside each other, e.g. in the phrases “goods and chattels” and “will and testament”. As a side note, “cattle” and “chattel” are the same word, originating from the time when cattle meant all livestock and not just bovines.
In the chapter Saffron, Hitchings makes the case that all words beginning in “al” came from Arabic via Spain and France (e.g. algorithm, algebra, alchemy and, ironically, alcohol), and also claims that candy is not an Americanism after all, but a word deriving from the Persian “qandi”, meaning sugar cane water. But some American alterna-words: “dumb” for stupid, “fall” for autumn, are actually 18th century English usages.
My fave facts:
Ivory used to come from walruses, not elephants.
Gibraltar is a bastardisation of the Arabic “Jabal Tariq” – the mountain of Tariq.
Beard in Basque is “bizar,” which lead to the English word bizarre, although it used to mean brave.
Carnival means “no more meat” – the first carnivals were held on Shrove Tuesday.
“Nicotine” was named for Jean Nicot who took tobacco from the new world to France.
King James I was the first anti-smoker.
Until the 17th century, men didn't have an Adam’s apple, or at least not a word for one. It was invented by a Hebrew Scholar.
No-one was British until the Act of Union of 1707
“Bogus” is a West African word for a counterfeit coin.
“Hot dog” was coined during WW1, when Americans wanted a patriotic name for their frankfurters (c.f. freedom fries).
Henry Ford wasn't the first to set up a production line in Detroit, that was Ransom Olds with his Oldsmobile.
Hitchings claims that new vocabulary introduced into the old language reflects the concerns of the incomers, his example being Norman words for law and bureaucracy becoming prevalent in English from 1066 onwards. New meanings for words also exacerbated divisions between the ruling Normans and the Saxon underclass:- “knave” was just a way of describing a young man until William the Bastard and his chums came along. However, words meaning the same thing in French and English languages were sometimes used alongside each other, e.g. in the phrases “goods and chattels” and “will and testament”. As a side note, “cattle” and “chattel” are the same word, originating from the time when cattle meant all livestock and not just bovines.
In the chapter Saffron, Hitchings makes the case that all words beginning in “al” came from Arabic via Spain and France (e.g. algorithm, algebra, alchemy and, ironically, alcohol), and also claims that candy is not an Americanism after all, but a word deriving from the Persian “qandi”, meaning sugar cane water. But some American alterna-words: “dumb” for stupid, “fall” for autumn, are actually 18th century English usages.
My fave facts:
Ivory used to come from walruses, not elephants.
Gibraltar is a bastardisation of the Arabic “Jabal Tariq” – the mountain of Tariq.
Beard in Basque is “bizar,” which lead to the English word bizarre, although it used to mean brave.
Carnival means “no more meat” – the first carnivals were held on Shrove Tuesday.
“Nicotine” was named for Jean Nicot who took tobacco from the new world to France.
King James I was the first anti-smoker.
Until the 17th century, men didn't have an Adam’s apple, or at least not a word for one. It was invented by a Hebrew Scholar.
No-one was British until the Act of Union of 1707
“Bogus” is a West African word for a counterfeit coin.
“Hot dog” was coined during WW1, when Americans wanted a patriotic name for their frankfurters (c.f. freedom fries).
Henry Ford wasn't the first to set up a production line in Detroit, that was Ransom Olds with his Oldsmobile.
March 9, 2009
Words are not created in a vacuum, but are loaded with a socio-cultural, often intellectual, spiritual, political and/or psychological history, the study of which can lead one to scintillating, yet often tantalizing, discoveries. Each word, Hitchings suggests, has a story to tell, usually a rather complex one. Hence, one has to be assiduous, diligent, and curious enough to listen to that story. How this word was coined, in what contexts it was thereafter used, how its meaning may have changed, what may have caused this change, whether or not this word was transferred from another language, why it was that particular language that transferred it, whether or not the meaning changed when it was transferred, and why this word has survived while others haven’t are but some of the questions that factor into this study. As a result, one comes away with not so much bits and pieces of etymological trivia, which are delightful in-and-of-themselves, but rather with a history of a people that is told by the words that those people have witnessed being woven into the complex, variegated fabric that is the English language. Personally, I’ve often thought of the metaphor of a mixed salad to explain the variety of languages that have made up English, where German is the lettuce (the base—English is, after all, a Germanic tongue), Greek and Latin the onions, mushrooms, bell peppers, what have you (very specific), and French the salad dressing, covering the surface and offering the most savoring taste (it’s been argued that French has contributed more vocabulary words to English than any other language. It’s also been used to sound refined and elegant, for reasons that Hitchings gets into). Yet, I was surprised to learn the great store of words coming in from other languages, some obvious, others not: Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Arabic, Bengali, Hindu, as well as various Native American and West-African tongues. It looks like my mixed salad analogy will have to grow a little more.
At his best, Hitchings is delving into the socio-cultural history of English-speaking people (particularly Americans and Brits), using words as often as possible as magnifying glasses to explore and explain that history (the mere fact that English is an acquisitive language speaks volumes about its colonial history). At his worst, Hitchings is giving a laundry-list of word derivations and “borrowings” from other languages that are enough to delight linguophiles such as myself, but can also be quite tedious to get through (have note cards ready if you want to keep track of them). It’s a rigorous read which, like language study itself, can be tedious, but the opportunity for intellectual (possibly philosophical) reward is rich.
At his best, Hitchings is delving into the socio-cultural history of English-speaking people (particularly Americans and Brits), using words as often as possible as magnifying glasses to explore and explain that history (the mere fact that English is an acquisitive language speaks volumes about its colonial history). At his worst, Hitchings is giving a laundry-list of word derivations and “borrowings” from other languages that are enough to delight linguophiles such as myself, but can also be quite tedious to get through (have note cards ready if you want to keep track of them). It’s a rigorous read which, like language study itself, can be tedious, but the opportunity for intellectual (possibly philosophical) reward is rich.
August 30, 2011
I found this book fascinating, however it is most definitly not a page-turner. The thang's dense. But if you're interested in what is essentially a brief summary of the origins and influences of the English language, this is a great place to go.
I learned all kinds of fun things, like a) what a calque is, b) the idea of inward borrowing (where words from the fringe of a language are adopted by the mainstream and given broader meaning), c) that the word malaria is from the italian mal-aria: bad air (along with literally thousands of explanations for words, that part actually gets a bit tedious), d) the themes and undertones associated with (especially) french and latin/greek within English and how they came to be, AND YOU GET THE PICTURE. It's awesome. I'll probably forget it all in a week.
My favorite paragraph was the last page of the second to last chapter, which was discussing how the English language can express the norms and worldviews of its culture of origin-- "For example, compared with other languages, English has an unusually large number of 'downtoners'-- words used for purposes of understatement, such as relatively, somewhat, hardly and almost. There is, moreover, a subtle tendency for colloqial English to express 'the values and standards of scientific discourse'-- manifest in our saying 'to be precise' or 'Exactly!'-- and for facts to be assiduously distinguished from opinions in a way striking and bizarre to a speaker of, say, Arabic, Swedish or Polish.... The notion of 'hard facts' is peculiar to English, and so, it seems, are many of our elaborate linguistic mechanisms for avoiding telling people what to do-- our modes of inviting and offering and suggestiong, which so strenuously avoid impinging on the autonomy of those who we are addressing..." (Hitchins, 333)
If you got through that quote and found it any more than mildly interesting, you would probably like this book.
I learned all kinds of fun things, like a) what a calque is, b) the idea of inward borrowing (where words from the fringe of a language are adopted by the mainstream and given broader meaning), c) that the word malaria is from the italian mal-aria: bad air (along with literally thousands of explanations for words, that part actually gets a bit tedious), d) the themes and undertones associated with (especially) french and latin/greek within English and how they came to be, AND YOU GET THE PICTURE. It's awesome. I'll probably forget it all in a week.
My favorite paragraph was the last page of the second to last chapter, which was discussing how the English language can express the norms and worldviews of its culture of origin-- "For example, compared with other languages, English has an unusually large number of 'downtoners'-- words used for purposes of understatement, such as relatively, somewhat, hardly and almost. There is, moreover, a subtle tendency for colloqial English to express 'the values and standards of scientific discourse'-- manifest in our saying 'to be precise' or 'Exactly!'-- and for facts to be assiduously distinguished from opinions in a way striking and bizarre to a speaker of, say, Arabic, Swedish or Polish.... The notion of 'hard facts' is peculiar to English, and so, it seems, are many of our elaborate linguistic mechanisms for avoiding telling people what to do-- our modes of inviting and offering and suggestiong, which so strenuously avoid impinging on the autonomy of those who we are addressing..." (Hitchins, 333)
If you got through that quote and found it any more than mildly interesting, you would probably like this book.
August 9, 2014
The Secret Life of Words is a history of English and, by extension, of those that speak the language. It chronicles the introduction of words from continental Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Oceania. No place in the world has been unaffected by the reach of English, but neither has English been untouched by them.
This book was both very fascinating and incredibly frustrating. The writing is very academic and I would easily class it as a very readable text, but I have a hard time recommending it to someone with just a casual interest. Not only can it be dry, but the author makes some very annoying choices regarding definitions... or at least the lack of definitions. Perhaps his deeper knowledge of the English language gives him a much broader casual knowledge of words that take on a certain esoteric quality, but it really diminishes the connection between the reader and the author.
One thing to take away is how very different a language the English of today is to its younger self. Even words that might seem to be the same from William Shakespeare to whomever is writing those Jerry Bruckheimer films that somehow continue to be green-lit are actually false friends with meanings that have been far removed from one another with the passage of time. Still it is a fascinating topic, if with a more limited audience than I expected when I first picked it up. From this book you get taste of the changes in culture, politics, warfare, and leisure that is mixed gently throughout the book. As I suggested, if it were a textbook I would have a significant amount of praise for it. It really shouldn't be used to introduce people to etymology, but if you are already intrigued by the history of words, I think it it will be worth the purchase price.
Oh, and of all the words that fill this book, what was perhaps my favourite secret life? Intestines, via French, was brought in to replace the Anglo-Saxon term "arse-ropes".
This book was both very fascinating and incredibly frustrating. The writing is very academic and I would easily class it as a very readable text, but I have a hard time recommending it to someone with just a casual interest. Not only can it be dry, but the author makes some very annoying choices regarding definitions... or at least the lack of definitions. Perhaps his deeper knowledge of the English language gives him a much broader casual knowledge of words that take on a certain esoteric quality, but it really diminishes the connection between the reader and the author.
One thing to take away is how very different a language the English of today is to its younger self. Even words that might seem to be the same from William Shakespeare to whomever is writing those Jerry Bruckheimer films that somehow continue to be green-lit are actually false friends with meanings that have been far removed from one another with the passage of time. Still it is a fascinating topic, if with a more limited audience than I expected when I first picked it up. From this book you get taste of the changes in culture, politics, warfare, and leisure that is mixed gently throughout the book. As I suggested, if it were a textbook I would have a significant amount of praise for it. It really shouldn't be used to introduce people to etymology, but if you are already intrigued by the history of words, I think it it will be worth the purchase price.
Oh, and of all the words that fill this book, what was perhaps my favourite secret life? Intestines, via French, was brought in to replace the Anglo-Saxon term "arse-ropes".
March 23, 2012
I took a month to read Hitchings's book, I admit. I had a hard time going through the historical beginning. I put it aside for a week or so and read some other books. And then I returned to it at a point where we/he had reached 19th century, and it was a breeze after that. I just get a bit turned around with all the invasions and imperial aggressions in the earlier history, but this may not be an issue for many.
Hitchings is a good writer with a knack for words on his own right. The book certainly has a narrative; it concerns how English became the way it is today through its borrowings and due to the invasions it experienced. I found some chapters fascinating, like the Voodoo chapter, probably because there was a concentration of words and intersections of cultures I was especially interested in. For example, the borrowings from Wolof (juke or joog, later become juke-house, later leads the way to jukebox), the good old story of bikini (one that I knew, but I like to be reminded of), and the origins of OK and jazz, not to mention hipster (a must-know if you live in Brooklyn!) His discussion in the same chapter of Gullah as the precursor for African English and in later chapters of how popular music and hip hop are the most successful mutators and creators of modern language is fascinating as well.
In the end, I learned a lot. Some of the most memorable etymologies: Magazine, bugger (perfect, if you have Bulgarian friends!), jazz (especially the journey of the word), sideburn (General Burnside, anyone?), doodle, usted (formal second-person pronoun in Spanish, comes from another language!), tulip, coffee, aloof, and nitwit.
The book has a nice index at the end that takes you to the word of interest, where you will find the world tangled up in history, invasion, violence, war, hatred, love, and absurdity. And that's the whole point.
Hitchings is a good writer with a knack for words on his own right. The book certainly has a narrative; it concerns how English became the way it is today through its borrowings and due to the invasions it experienced. I found some chapters fascinating, like the Voodoo chapter, probably because there was a concentration of words and intersections of cultures I was especially interested in. For example, the borrowings from Wolof (juke or joog, later become juke-house, later leads the way to jukebox), the good old story of bikini (one that I knew, but I like to be reminded of), and the origins of OK and jazz, not to mention hipster (a must-know if you live in Brooklyn!) His discussion in the same chapter of Gullah as the precursor for African English and in later chapters of how popular music and hip hop are the most successful mutators and creators of modern language is fascinating as well.
In the end, I learned a lot. Some of the most memorable etymologies: Magazine, bugger (perfect, if you have Bulgarian friends!), jazz (especially the journey of the word), sideburn (General Burnside, anyone?), doodle, usted (formal second-person pronoun in Spanish, comes from another language!), tulip, coffee, aloof, and nitwit.
The book has a nice index at the end that takes you to the word of interest, where you will find the world tangled up in history, invasion, violence, war, hatred, love, and absurdity. And that's the whole point.
September 10, 2009
Philological/lexicographic porn. And that's just the part about Greek words! I would definitely recommend this if you are studying for the GRE, even though you may find this book at once valuable and discouraging when Hitchings, who is a brilliant writer, demonstrates just how much of your own language you don't know. I would also really, really strongly recommend this to anyone who is interested in languages or communication generally.
A well-researched book could tell the story of the English language from its origins as the limited, gruff exchange of hardy Anglo-Saxons to a portrait, still in progress, of all the peoples whom any Englishman anywhere has ever met. Hitchings is the man and could do that in his sleep. So he does more, inviting the reader to watch individual words as they bounce around nations, sail around new oceans, and happen upon writers who dress them in funny little prefixes. And mispronunciation. Hey! I just did it, too!
This book definitely had the capability to come across like someone reading a dictionary aloud, and I was skeptical at first of reading a book...about words. But Hitchings is a clever dude and deploys enough puns and really, really interesting stories to keep you giggling through each chapter. That said, I knocked Hitchings a full star because the book didn't have much of a narrative, which I think is fine for a book like this, but which still requires a bit of fortitude to get through. But who cares? I don't remember most of the new words I saw, but I still really enjoyed this book.
A well-researched book could tell the story of the English language from its origins as the limited, gruff exchange of hardy Anglo-Saxons to a portrait, still in progress, of all the peoples whom any Englishman anywhere has ever met. Hitchings is the man and could do that in his sleep. So he does more, inviting the reader to watch individual words as they bounce around nations, sail around new oceans, and happen upon writers who dress them in funny little prefixes. And mispronunciation. Hey! I just did it, too!
This book definitely had the capability to come across like someone reading a dictionary aloud, and I was skeptical at first of reading a book...about words. But Hitchings is a clever dude and deploys enough puns and really, really interesting stories to keep you giggling through each chapter. That said, I knocked Hitchings a full star because the book didn't have much of a narrative, which I think is fine for a book like this, but which still requires a bit of fortitude to get through. But who cares? I don't remember most of the new words I saw, but I still really enjoyed this book.
June 22, 2009
If you are the sort of person who, as I sometimes do, wakes out of a sound sleep to wonder aloud just exactly what walnuts have to do with walls or some such similar question, then this is a reference book you will read with pleasure. The Secret Life of Words does not offer a continuous narrative, but is instead a collection of word histories and stories grouped into themed chapters such as "Saffron," "Teapot," or "Powwow." A handy index of words and phrases is in the back of the book.
In the books of great writers, words are so much more than dictionary definitions and this book illustrates why. The more we know about a word--its origins, meanings, and history--the richer and more subtle our communications may become. I believe an informed reader gets more pleasure as well as better understanding from his or her reading and this book has already helped me to apprehend connections between words that were previously invisible to me.
Walnuts, by the way, turn out to have nothing to do with walls. Hitchings explains that the Old English "walhnutu" meant "foreign nut" and was used to distinguish Italian walnuts from the local hazelnuts.
In the books of great writers, words are so much more than dictionary definitions and this book illustrates why. The more we know about a word--its origins, meanings, and history--the richer and more subtle our communications may become. I believe an informed reader gets more pleasure as well as better understanding from his or her reading and this book has already helped me to apprehend connections between words that were previously invisible to me.
Walnuts, by the way, turn out to have nothing to do with walls. Hitchings explains that the Old English "walhnutu" meant "foreign nut" and was used to distinguish Italian walnuts from the local hazelnuts.
Currently reading
August 30, 2011Wonderful book I found by accident, oh, but nothing is without reason I was told while practicing a new endeavor, poem writing.The book moves the word through many side roads and detours of history itself and is a fascinating journey for one that has always loved the power and clarity of certain words to define specifically what my mind was dishing out behind some veil. I learned that language was everything as great poets had told, each poem was a statement thought out after much, much thought and presented to me, some even very specific to my circumstance and I would hold it near forever in its joy.It became mine and each bit or note I wrote myself I could recognize in a crowd like I would a dear friend.All just a collection of words that get along so well, it amazes me each day, making me very happy. It all started when Steven Spielberg was asked, what will be the next big thing and it touched me when he said "The Word" as simple as that!
April 14, 2021
In maintaining the irregularity of its spelling, the English language keeps visible the roots/history of much of its lexicon. This was a statement I’d recently ran across (its source lost in my too casual receptivity) which I felt had some merit, and which I had hoped would be echoed in Hitchings’ informative and largely entertaining account of the history of modern, 21st-century English. I was disappointed in this regard—Hitchings made no such overt statement—but I nonetheless found in the numerous examples of word borrowings and neologisms support for this general statement of visible origins, even if its generality was, at best, approximate. For example, many Latinate words have entered English through French or Spanish influence, and they appear to be direct imports from Latin, the usual trappings of French or Spanish influence invisible. A smattering of examples of what look like Latin-origin words, but which were borrowed from the French: logistics, marine, jurisdiction, constitution, capitalism, administration, accord, automobile.
Another concept I’d recently bumped into (probably from the same source as the one about English’s irregular spelling) was how English was a syncretic language, that in the confluence of so many languages in its origins (Celt, Latin, Angle, Norse, etc.) that it lost many of its inflections and simplified its syntax to better accommodate the incorporation of new lexemes (fancy word Hitchings tells us means “lexical unit”, ie, “word”). Hitchings does cover some of this, explaining how easily English from the beginning has been able to adopt and adapt new words from other languages, easily turning them into verbs, adjectives, or nouns. An example of this is making plurals, which in English only requires adding an “s” to a noun. In large part, the foreign word will typically lose its native plural inflection, though there are exceptions, as with Latinate words as alumnus/alumni or datum/data.
So, while I was thwarted in seeing overt reference to these two passing concepts about English (irregular spelling and the word syncretism), Hitchings makes the history of English an entertaining tour. Any single chapter of his book could be expanded to fill a scholarly volume, so this book of sixteen chapters is going to be necessarily summary and even breezy, much as Bill Bryson did with his The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way. In particular, pre-Chaucerian English (ie, the English of Beowulf and predecessors) is little touched upon in any specific way, and I missed being able to trace the development of contemporary English words from their Old English variants.
What I did learn was the concept of the calque (from the French), which refers to a “traced” version of a phrase or idiom from another language. I did not realize that so many oddly mannered (ie, idiomatic) phrases in English had their origins in other countries. Examples of words/phrasings calqued from other languages include: long time no see (Chinese), brainwashing (Chinese), marriage of convenience (French, “mariage de convenance”), by heart (French, “par cœur”), that goes without saying (French, “cela va sans dire”, worldview (German, “Weltanschaung”), subliminal (formed from Latin [sub-, “below", plus limen “threshold"] to calque “unterschwellig”.
The “inkhorn wars” was another topic that Hitchings touched on from which I got a better, more complete understanding. In essence, it was a debate amongst writers in England in the late 18th century, and each side argued the merits of new additions to the English language from other sources, particularly Latin and French. While many advocated a liberal inclusion, notable figures such as Samuel Johnson were scathing in their rebuke of the unnecessary additions, on the grounds that they diluted sense and made their speakers appear foppish and mannered. Recurrences of these inkhorn wars, Hitchings notes, have appeared in almost every generation, and there are always “conservators” of the language who grumpily ignore the fact that much of the language they use to make their arguments is borrowed.
The later chapters seem amorphous and are barely contained by their titles, whereas the first dozen chapters seem to work through themes of word acquisition in an orderly and historical fashion. (Although one late chapter, Voodoo, is so scant, it almost seems parenthetical.) The final chapter, Angst, was particularly scattershot, and its theme ranged over the whole of 20th-century word adoptions, waning English imperialism, and waxing American imperialism. Hitchings evinces anxiety about what it means that nearly one-half the globe speaks English as a first or second language, especially when the concepts that the language exports are largely commercial, youth oriented, and frivolous. Also in this chapter is a discussion of the loss of languages throughout the world, much like species extinctions, which instance occurs at the time of writing (2008) once a fortnight.
Based on the supporting materials in this book—endnotes, bibliography, list of words cited, and index—Hitchings has done a yeoman’s work in reading and sorting the many, many texts he’s mounted in his grey literature. Most notably, his acknowledgments cite an extensive use of the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), still the word maven’s best friend for learning the meaning and history of any English word. Hitchings has taken this wealth of materials to present a concise, lively, and entertaining book, especially if you have some background and interest in the subject. If there’s any failing in this book, it’s the latter half of the book’s odd summary account of various periods and/or sources of English words, which appear disjointed and ad hoc.
Another concept I’d recently bumped into (probably from the same source as the one about English’s irregular spelling) was how English was a syncretic language, that in the confluence of so many languages in its origins (Celt, Latin, Angle, Norse, etc.) that it lost many of its inflections and simplified its syntax to better accommodate the incorporation of new lexemes (fancy word Hitchings tells us means “lexical unit”, ie, “word”). Hitchings does cover some of this, explaining how easily English from the beginning has been able to adopt and adapt new words from other languages, easily turning them into verbs, adjectives, or nouns. An example of this is making plurals, which in English only requires adding an “s” to a noun. In large part, the foreign word will typically lose its native plural inflection, though there are exceptions, as with Latinate words as alumnus/alumni or datum/data.
So, while I was thwarted in seeing overt reference to these two passing concepts about English (irregular spelling and the word syncretism), Hitchings makes the history of English an entertaining tour. Any single chapter of his book could be expanded to fill a scholarly volume, so this book of sixteen chapters is going to be necessarily summary and even breezy, much as Bill Bryson did with his The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way. In particular, pre-Chaucerian English (ie, the English of Beowulf and predecessors) is little touched upon in any specific way, and I missed being able to trace the development of contemporary English words from their Old English variants.
What I did learn was the concept of the calque (from the French), which refers to a “traced” version of a phrase or idiom from another language. I did not realize that so many oddly mannered (ie, idiomatic) phrases in English had their origins in other countries. Examples of words/phrasings calqued from other languages include: long time no see (Chinese), brainwashing (Chinese), marriage of convenience (French, “mariage de convenance”), by heart (French, “par cœur”), that goes without saying (French, “cela va sans dire”, worldview (German, “Weltanschaung”), subliminal (formed from Latin [sub-, “below", plus limen “threshold"] to calque “unterschwellig”.
The “inkhorn wars” was another topic that Hitchings touched on from which I got a better, more complete understanding. In essence, it was a debate amongst writers in England in the late 18th century, and each side argued the merits of new additions to the English language from other sources, particularly Latin and French. While many advocated a liberal inclusion, notable figures such as Samuel Johnson were scathing in their rebuke of the unnecessary additions, on the grounds that they diluted sense and made their speakers appear foppish and mannered. Recurrences of these inkhorn wars, Hitchings notes, have appeared in almost every generation, and there are always “conservators” of the language who grumpily ignore the fact that much of the language they use to make their arguments is borrowed.
The later chapters seem amorphous and are barely contained by their titles, whereas the first dozen chapters seem to work through themes of word acquisition in an orderly and historical fashion. (Although one late chapter, Voodoo, is so scant, it almost seems parenthetical.) The final chapter, Angst, was particularly scattershot, and its theme ranged over the whole of 20th-century word adoptions, waning English imperialism, and waxing American imperialism. Hitchings evinces anxiety about what it means that nearly one-half the globe speaks English as a first or second language, especially when the concepts that the language exports are largely commercial, youth oriented, and frivolous. Also in this chapter is a discussion of the loss of languages throughout the world, much like species extinctions, which instance occurs at the time of writing (2008) once a fortnight.
Based on the supporting materials in this book—endnotes, bibliography, list of words cited, and index—Hitchings has done a yeoman’s work in reading and sorting the many, many texts he’s mounted in his grey literature. Most notably, his acknowledgments cite an extensive use of the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), still the word maven’s best friend for learning the meaning and history of any English word. Hitchings has taken this wealth of materials to present a concise, lively, and entertaining book, especially if you have some background and interest in the subject. If there’s any failing in this book, it’s the latter half of the book’s odd summary account of various periods and/or sources of English words, which appear disjointed and ad hoc.
January 1, 2009
I love words. I love language and the history of language. I'm the type of person that looks for the dictionaries with the history of the English language in the front. Any one that shares this interest would enjoy reading this book. The author of this books suggests that we should wonder more often how our language (English)has formed. I kind of chuckled when I read this comment, because I have always been curious about the changes in meaning of words and the evolution of language. I have only just begun reading this book; however, I find it interesting, well thought out, and fun.
This book was given to me as a gift to complement Semantic Antics.
This book was given to me as a gift to complement Semantic Antics.
January 3, 2009
I didn't even know I was waiting for this book most of my life. It explains so much. And yet most of the time it can't help but feel like each paragraph is just an etymological tangent, with each chapter focusing on the different origins of words in our "promiscuous" English language. This is what made it hard to read it more quickly. I felt like I was mostly absorbing little nuggets of information, rather than a substantial narrative of the English language. But it is perfect for anyone with a language obsession, for people like me who agonize over the nuances of words and the significance of their origins.
November 26, 2016
Really wanted to like this one, but count me among the hordes of reviewers who just found it to be too dry and lacking narrative arc (despite having literal history as a framework!). I did learn some interesting word origins that I hadn't known before, but I found myself wishing I was receiving them in a different format, like a page-a-day calendar or a daily email or something. If I'm going to get a bunch of isolated facts, might as well space them out so I can appreciate each one uniquely, rather than dumping them all on me at once so I feel like I'm slogging through.
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July 2, 2016Etymological study of English vocabulary. Great on evoking speculations of what it might have been like to communicate across cultures when, say, the Normans invaded and intermarried with the Danes. Doesn't even attempt to question the status of language as truth, which at this point seems like a relief.
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