The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

by Henry Hitchings

Book Overview

AN ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEAR The Secret Life of Words is a wide-ranging account of the transplanted, stolen, bastardized words we've come to know as the English languag. It's a history of English as... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312428561
• ISBN13: 9780312428563
• Release Date: September 2009
• Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Rambling, Disconnected, Stream of Conciousness

Ironic to me that this is a study of English language and communication. I found it highly rambling and needlessly disconnected. The structure is far too jumpy. Stick with David Crystal for history of English language. Two stars for its ambition only.

A book of words about words

Usual good delivery service. The book itself was a great read - I learnt an enormous amount about my own language.

A ehtymological dive into history

A pure joy! The book offers a comprehensive, yet fluently written, ethymolgical analysis of the English language, while placing it against the relevant historical background. A "tour de force"!

Packed with insights and offers a lively tone

Words are key to everyday living and an average person spends the day immersed in using them but how many think about usage and its evolution? THE SECRET LIFE OF WORDS offers a history of the English language and vocabulary changes over the decades but goes a step beyond competing books in analyzing how word choices observe and record history, reflect social change, and document or change the past. From word originals and their cultural connections to the evolving meaning of everyday expressions, THE SECRET LIFE OF WORDS is packed with insights and offers a lively tone appropriate not just for high school to college-level libraries, but for general-interest lending libraries. Diane C. Donovan California Bookwatch

Words & Wit & Wisdom

Many self-confessed bibliomaniacs and word junkies first discovered Henry Hitchings on the publication of his first book, a creative look at Samuel Johnson and his great Dictionary, some two years ago. Now Hitchings delivers a second book targeted at the same crowd, one with a far greater scope and thus a massive challenge for even the most talented non-fiction writer: nothing less than the evolution of the English language. Thankfully, what could have been a dry and overly-academic narrative is transformed by his style into a journey of discovery. We are at Hitchings' side as he almost literally revels in the discovery of the ways in which military and cultural invasions transformed English (not new or surprising material) to what was, to me, the fresher and more intriguing topic of how English explorers "repatriated" words from other languages they encountered, from the Americas to Japan. That thematic approach avoids another potential trap: the epoch by epoch survey, which also could have transformed this into a tedious read that none but scholars and the most dutiful or stubborn of readers would have completed. Instead, anyone reading this spend hours engrossed in an absorbing book -- and will never look at words and how he or she uses them in the same way again. Hitchings may not write for a scholarly audience, but this is far and away the best book I have read for the curious layperson on the topic, especially as our language is again being transformed by new technology (not just the vocabulary, but usage & popularity) in the same ways that it was reshaped by the advent of the printing press.

How Words Reflect Our History

Language is simply the way we transmit ideas to others, but it is never so simple. Because it is involved in almost everything we do, it reflects and affects history, culture, fashion, cooking, politics and more. You could study English, for instance, and learn aspects of all these spheres, because, as Henry Hitchings says, "Studying language enables an archaeology of human experience: words contain the fossils of past dreams and traumas." It is just the sort of study he has undertaken in _The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English_ (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), a big, amazing compilation about where words came from and what such histories show about world history and customs. Thousands of everyday and recondite words are herein traced and taken apart to see what made them tick and how time has changed them. Hitchings, previously known for an impressive history of Dr. Johnson's compilation of his dictionary, has a huge command of facts, but his erudition, plain on every page, is lightly expressed and his enthusiasm for his task is contagious. Fewer than a quarter of English words reflect a Germanic origin; the rest have been imposed on Britain by being conquered nearly a thousand years ago, or by conquering or visiting all those centuries thereafter, or by sponsoring successful daughter nations. Our "cheese" is related to the Latin "caseus", for instance, but the Normans gave us plenty of food terms like "gravy" or "mustard". New imports needed new words; walnuts were new to Britain ages ago, and the name is a version of the Old English "walhnutu" which means "foreign nut"; it was from Italy, and the name distinguished it from the native hazelnut. Wherever Britons went, they ate, and they traded foods just as surely as they traded words for them. The Aztecs gave us words for guacamole, for instance, and for the tomato. Initially tomatoes were called "love apples" because of their supposed aphrodisiac qualities; perhaps this is also the reason the humble tomato is called "pomodoro" in Italian, "apple of gold". Another native Nahuatl word we got from Spanish is "avocado", which takes its name from the Nahuatl term for a testicle, because of its shape. Borrowings have to be practical; the native speakers of Nahuatl may have easily been able to say "tlilxochitl", but the pronunciation was indigestible to the Spanish, so a doctor serving in Brazil renamed it "vanilla" meaning "little sheath". That had to do with the shape of the bean's enclosure, but "coriander" comes from its particular scent. You see, it smells just like crushed bedbugs, and "koris" is Greek for bedbug. Not all the words for foods in new lands get adopted; the Hawaiian fish humuhumunukunukuapuaa may be tasty, but no one refers to it. Words bustled among each other for acceptance. The author of a 1588 memoir of traveling in the New World and noting Algonquin terms could not have predicted that "c