After my reading of Righting the Mother Tongue the other day, I have a revived interest in the history of the English language. The next book on the subject that I think I might read is The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English by Henry Hitchings. This is a book about word origins which is always an interesting and humorous subject. Apparently English has its origins in 350 languages. This explains a lot about the spelling and pronunciation discrepancies that were pointed out in David Wolman's book.There is a review up on The Independent right now. This picture is the cool UK cover.
Pondering words and all the baggage they bring with them,
K
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