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The Wonderful World of Words
The Wonderful World of Words is bursting with truly oddball facts about words and language - and will have you hooked from the very first page..
Did you know that 'Almost' is the longest word in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order? Or that 'Stewardesses' is the longest word you can type solely with your left hand? Or that fireflies aren't flies, they're beetles?
From information about words and their uses, useful lists of things you never knew had names, palindromes, famous lines from literature and film, to bizarre test answers and much, much more, The Wonderful World of Words is bursting with truly oddball facts about words and language - and will have you hooked from the very first page.
An essential guide for anyone interested in a humorous look at the world of language.
Did you know that 'Almost' is the longest word in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order? Or that 'Stewardesses' is the longest word you can type solely with your left hand? Or that fireflies aren't flies, they're beetles?
From information about words and their uses, useful lists of things you never knew had names, palindromes, famous lines from literature and film, to bizarre test answers and much, much more, The Wonderful World of Words is bursting with truly oddball facts about words and language - and will have you hooked from the very first page.
An essential guide for anyone interested in a humorous look at the world of language.
- GenresNonfictionLinguistics
192 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2014
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27 people want to read
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July 30, 2020My initial impression was something along the lines of "ok, so this is a collection of factoids, some are lame and some I already know but there are some cool things I am learning. Not great, has a slightly kiddish formatting, a bit disconnected and lacking in direction, but not bad."
And then I reached this:
In what decade was this written? Pluto hasn't been a planet in ages. I double-checked the acknowledgements at the front, and it's dated 2016. Ok, so Symons was living under a rock for an entire decade. Moving on...
I found, just a few pages later:
I have read enough fantasy to know about the existence of berserkers in Norse mythology/legends, and I am quite certain that, while the first half of this is correct, the second isn't exactly accurate; this description doesn't apply to all Vikings, just a special subset of them who were particularly violent and battle-mad and were thus given this name. (A cursory google seems to support this.)
At this point, I started cranking my bullshit detectors up because having two obvious (to me, at least) factual inaccuracies in such a short space was not a good sign.
I read on to page 80, on the etymology of the days of the week, in which Symons writes, "We've inherited three of the names for our days from the Old English, three from the Old Norse and just one from the Romans". In particular, Wednesday is supposed to come from Norse, being named after "the supreme Norse god Woden." This set the alarm bells ringing, because the supreme Norse god in question is called Odin in Old Norse; Woden is the Old Saxon name (and Wotan the Old Germanic one - this is the fact which I knew which made me think something was wrong). I do a bit of googling, and there is nothing to suggest that three of the days are from Old Norse; it seems that all the days but Saturday have Old English origins.
I moved on. The (obvious) errors disappeared for awhile, and then I reached this gem:
For anyone with any amount of knowledge of thermodymanics (or indeed, any amount of common sense), this is plain impossible. Any object equilibriates to the temperature of its surroundings, and if cucumbers did indeed have this magical property, someone would have made millions off it by turning it into ice storage or something. I did some looking around on the internet for this; this "factoid" seems to have arisen through some mysterious process independent of actual scientific research, and the true origin seems to be a poem by John Gay. Between this and the Pluto thing, I'm not sure if Symons has much scientific knowledge at all.
This is followed by a couple of sections of funny quotes and stuff which can't possibly be wrong, but at the next opportunity (by which time my bullshit detector is dialed up to the maximum), Symons produces more...questionable content.
Firstly, I'm not sure how one would define the "English language" in this case; how would one draw the line between Old English and its Germanic predecessor? And given any possible such definition, why on earth would "town", of all words, be the oldest one? It is far more likely that a simple grammatical word (eg. "I", "the") would beat a noun which refers to what is, in the grand scheme of things, a rather modern concept. I did a bit of googling again, and found this article which names "I", "we", "two", and "three" as the candidates for the title, a far more convincing result. Symons' result, on the other hand, seems to come from this, which traces back to...*gasp* a Youtube video.
On the very same page:
This struck me as odd, because these numbers are "elf" and "zwölf" in German, which, if you compare them to their English counterparts, are obvious cognates. But Anglo-Saxon is an ancestor of Modern English that came about after English diverged from German, so in all likelihood, any such etymological construction would have occurred in an earlier form of English; indeed, this "one-left"/"two-left" compound can be traced all the way back to Proto-Indo-European. (So does that make eleven and twelve the oldest words in English?)
At this point, I was just reading this book to look for mistakes. I was rewarded soon enough:
My immediate response was just complete confusion. I then took a moment to translate both words, individually, into Chinese, and got 危机 and 机会 respectively. So maybe the word Symons is referring to is...机? But 机 certainly does not mean crisis (it is the 危 that lends it the tone of danger), and if this "factoid" were true, one might as well say that the words for 'crisis', 'opportunity', 'aeroplane', and 'machine' are one and the same. My Chinese isn't great, but it isn't that bad.
On the next page: "The Albanian language, one of Europe's oldest, is an Indo-European language on it's [sic] own separate branch." I guess I'm nit-picking now but this is a book about language, for goodness' sake.
Page 167: "A lot of modern English first names come from Greek words. The reason is almost certainly because thanks to the internet, English is the lingua franca of the world." Hold up. There are so many things to unpack in this statement. So Symons is saying that English is the lingua franca of the world because of something which has only existed on a global scale for a couple of decades, and not because of the UK's colonial past? And that this is somehow the reason that most English names have a Greek origin, if that is even true at all?
Page 170: "Sanskrit is considered the mother of all higher languages." Firstly, what a vacuous statement. Secondly, what is a "higher language"? Is this some old language-puristic opinion from a few centuries ago? Sanskrit is Indo-European and old, and is indeed the "mother" of a lot of modern languages, but it certainly isn't the mother of all the European ones, including English, the "lingua franca of the world." Anyway, I googled this exact quote and traced it back to a TIL post on Reddit, which I suspect is also where Symons found his zinger about cucumbers.
On the same page: "Asia has the most languages and the most speakers, accounting for sixty-one percent of all language speakers in the world." I'm not sure what on earth "language-speakers" refers to (isn't every person, barring developmental disabilities, a language-speaker?), and how on earth Symons didn't wonder this when he dumped this into the book.
This is followed by a list of "countries" (p. 172) which have English as an official language. This includes Puerto Rico, Gibraltar and the Isle of Man.
Page 184: "The longest words with vertical symmetry (the left half is a mirror image of the right half) are otto, ma'am, and toot." Last I checked, a is not a mirror image of a, no matter how you write it. (Is Symons dyslexic?)
Almost done! Just as I thought my work was done, I reached the last page (p. 192), a list of chemical elements named after people. This includes "Hahnium", named after Otto Hahn, an element name which I didn't recognise, which was very strange, since I have spent an excessively large number of hours of my life staring at periodic tables. I entered this name into Google and, lo and behold, the element in question is actually Dubnium, a name which was decided upon as a compromise between two research teams who'd claimed the discovery of the element, one of which proposed the name Hahnium. Also, Seaborgium, named after my favourite chemist (on account of his first name), is conspicuously missing.
And thus ended my extremely aggravating read of this book. In the introduction, Symons writes, "...the question I am asked more than any other is 'Where did you find your facts?' Sometimes implicit in that question is the idea that I just download stuff from the internet...". This book gives me no reason to believe otherwise.
All in all: a collection of language factoids (some interesting, some not - and some wrong) and language jokes (some funny, some just straight out lame); vaguely interesting as a whole, but it gives the overall impression of something 10-year-old me would have produced, trawling the internet to read up on language topics that interested me. I would recommend this for my younger self, except that the surprising number of errors (and these are just those that I noticed!) casts a shadow of doubt on the veracity on all the other claims in this book, depriving it of any intellectual value it might have otherwise had. I don't see much of a difference between reading this book and subscribing to a bunch of language feeds on Facebook and Twitter, and reading the occasional Buzzfeed article just to shake things up. The only good thing I can really say about this is that it was short.
And then I reached this:
The order of planets in distance from the Sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto - p. 71
In what decade was this written? Pluto hasn't been a planet in ages. I double-checked the acknowledgements at the front, and it's dated 2016. Ok, so Symons was living under a rock for an entire decade. Moving on...
I found, just a few pages later:
Berserk: This used to mean 'mad' or 'out of control'. It comes from the Norse for 'bare shirt' because the Vikings went into battle bare-chested - whatever the weather - and fought like madmen. - p. 74
I have read enough fantasy to know about the existence of berserkers in Norse mythology/legends, and I am quite certain that, while the first half of this is correct, the second isn't exactly accurate; this description doesn't apply to all Vikings, just a special subset of them who were particularly violent and battle-mad and were thus given this name. (A cursory google seems to support this.)
At this point, I started cranking my bullshit detectors up because having two obvious (to me, at least) factual inaccuracies in such a short space was not a good sign.
I read on to page 80, on the etymology of the days of the week, in which Symons writes, "We've inherited three of the names for our days from the Old English, three from the Old Norse and just one from the Romans". In particular, Wednesday is supposed to come from Norse, being named after "the supreme Norse god Woden." This set the alarm bells ringing, because the supreme Norse god in question is called Odin in Old Norse; Woden is the Old Saxon name (and Wotan the Old Germanic one - this is the fact which I knew which made me think something was wrong). I do a bit of googling, and there is nothing to suggest that three of the days are from Old Norse; it seems that all the days but Saturday have Old English origins.
I moved on. The (obvious) errors disappeared for awhile, and then I reached this gem:
Cool as a cucumber: There's a good reason why cucumber is used as the epitome of cool and it's entirely down to the fact that however hot or cold the weather is, the middle of a cucumber - its core - is usually some 11 deg C (20 deg F) colder than its outside temperature. - p. 128
For anyone with any amount of knowledge of thermodymanics (or indeed, any amount of common sense), this is plain impossible. Any object equilibriates to the temperature of its surroundings, and if cucumbers did indeed have this magical property, someone would have made millions off it by turning it into ice storage or something. I did some looking around on the internet for this; this "factoid" seems to have arisen through some mysterious process independent of actual scientific research, and the true origin seems to be a poem by John Gay. Between this and the Pluto thing, I'm not sure if Symons has much scientific knowledge at all.
This is followed by a couple of sections of funny quotes and stuff which can't possibly be wrong, but at the next opportunity (by which time my bullshit detector is dialed up to the maximum), Symons produces more...questionable content.
The oldest word in the English language is town. - p. 148
Firstly, I'm not sure how one would define the "English language" in this case; how would one draw the line between Old English and its Germanic predecessor? And given any possible such definition, why on earth would "town", of all words, be the oldest one? It is far more likely that a simple grammatical word (eg. "I", "the") would beat a noun which refers to what is, in the grand scheme of things, a rather modern concept. I did a bit of googling again, and found this article which names "I", "we", "two", and "three" as the candidates for the title, a far more convincing result. Symons' result, on the other hand, seems to come from this, which traces back to...*gasp* a Youtube video.
On the very same page:
The names for the numbers eleven and twelve in English come from the Anglo-Saxon for one left (aend-lefene) and two-left (twa-lefene). - p. 148
This struck me as odd, because these numbers are "elf" and "zwölf" in German, which, if you compare them to their English counterparts, are obvious cognates. But Anglo-Saxon is an ancestor of Modern English that came about after English diverged from German, so in all likelihood, any such etymological construction would have occurred in an earlier form of English; indeed, this "one-left"/"two-left" compound can be traced all the way back to Proto-Indo-European. (So does that make eleven and twelve the oldest words in English?)
At this point, I was just reading this book to look for mistakes. I was rewarded soon enough:
In Chinese, the words 'crisis' and 'opportunity' are the same. - p. 164
My immediate response was just complete confusion. I then took a moment to translate both words, individually, into Chinese, and got 危机 and 机会 respectively. So maybe the word Symons is referring to is...机? But 机 certainly does not mean crisis (it is the 危 that lends it the tone of danger), and if this "factoid" were true, one might as well say that the words for 'crisis', 'opportunity', 'aeroplane', and 'machine' are one and the same. My Chinese isn't great, but it isn't that bad.
On the next page: "The Albanian language, one of Europe's oldest, is an Indo-European language on it's [sic] own separate branch." I guess I'm nit-picking now but this is a book about language, for goodness' sake.
Page 167: "A lot of modern English first names come from Greek words. The reason is almost certainly because thanks to the internet, English is the lingua franca of the world." Hold up. There are so many things to unpack in this statement. So Symons is saying that English is the lingua franca of the world because of something which has only existed on a global scale for a couple of decades, and not because of the UK's colonial past? And that this is somehow the reason that most English names have a Greek origin, if that is even true at all?
Page 170: "Sanskrit is considered the mother of all higher languages." Firstly, what a vacuous statement. Secondly, what is a "higher language"? Is this some old language-puristic opinion from a few centuries ago? Sanskrit is Indo-European and old, and is indeed the "mother" of a lot of modern languages, but it certainly isn't the mother of all the European ones, including English, the "lingua franca of the world." Anyway, I googled this exact quote and traced it back to a TIL post on Reddit, which I suspect is also where Symons found his zinger about cucumbers.
On the same page: "Asia has the most languages and the most speakers, accounting for sixty-one percent of all language speakers in the world." I'm not sure what on earth "language-speakers" refers to (isn't every person, barring developmental disabilities, a language-speaker?), and how on earth Symons didn't wonder this when he dumped this into the book.
This is followed by a list of "countries" (p. 172) which have English as an official language. This includes Puerto Rico, Gibraltar and the Isle of Man.
Page 184: "The longest words with vertical symmetry (the left half is a mirror image of the right half) are otto, ma'am, and toot." Last I checked, a is not a mirror image of a, no matter how you write it. (Is Symons dyslexic?)
Almost done! Just as I thought my work was done, I reached the last page (p. 192), a list of chemical elements named after people. This includes "Hahnium", named after Otto Hahn, an element name which I didn't recognise, which was very strange, since I have spent an excessively large number of hours of my life staring at periodic tables. I entered this name into Google and, lo and behold, the element in question is actually Dubnium, a name which was decided upon as a compromise between two research teams who'd claimed the discovery of the element, one of which proposed the name Hahnium. Also, Seaborgium, named after my favourite chemist (on account of his first name), is conspicuously missing.
And thus ended my extremely aggravating read of this book. In the introduction, Symons writes, "...the question I am asked more than any other is 'Where did you find your facts?' Sometimes implicit in that question is the idea that I just download stuff from the internet...". This book gives me no reason to believe otherwise.
All in all: a collection of language factoids (some interesting, some not - and some wrong) and language jokes (some funny, some just straight out lame); vaguely interesting as a whole, but it gives the overall impression of something 10-year-old me would have produced, trawling the internet to read up on language topics that interested me. I would recommend this for my younger self, except that the surprising number of errors (and these are just those that I noticed!) casts a shadow of doubt on the veracity on all the other claims in this book, depriving it of any intellectual value it might have otherwise had. I don't see much of a difference between reading this book and subscribing to a bunch of language feeds on Facebook and Twitter, and reading the occasional Buzzfeed article just to shake things up. The only good thing I can really say about this is that it was short.
November 25, 2018
I generally like these random-list books but this one was just eh.
February 14, 2019
An entertaining collection of facts, anecdotes and lists, all relating to the English language. If you're a word nerd like me, you'll enjoy this one.
February 20, 2021
Interesting book of factoids. Not sure all of them are completely accurate but an amusing collection all the same!
January 23, 2022
I kind of nicked this book off a dear friend of mine. No, she gave it to me using her own hand. It’s a brilliant book. I laugh hysterically at night time in my own tiny apartment.
January 10, 2023
Was very fun.
Interesting dive into English, didn't like that there weren't any references to the historical claims.
Interesting dive into English, didn't like that there weren't any references to the historical claims.
January 24, 2023
Very good, I particularly enjoyed the real titles of books and things stewardesses have said
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews