Useless Etymology - Jess Zafarris

    2025; 330 pages.  Full Title: Useless Etymology—Off Beat Word Origins for Curious Minds.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Etymology; Linguistics; Language; Reference.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

 

    Quick!  What the plural of “octopus”?  Is it octopuses, octopi, or octopodes?  If that kind of question fascinates you, you’re probably a word nerd.  Don't worry, so am I.

 

    It’s all a matter of from which older language the word “octopus” is derived.  Ancient Latin?  Ancient Greece?  Early English?  Some other even older and now-forgotten language? 

 

    Jess Zafarris freely admits she is a word nerd.  She’s researched the origins of a plethora of English words and has compiled them into this book, Useless Etymology.

 

    Hmm.  I wonder how much a “plethora” is and from what old language it came from.  Happily, the answer is in this book.  So is her opinion as to which “plural of octopus” is the most correct.  It might surprise you.

 

What’s To Like...

    Useless Etymology is divided into 22 chapters, plus a Prologue and an Epilogue.  My favorites were:

Chapter 09: Hit the Books: The origins of Literary and Rhetorical terms.

Chapter 11: Animalogical: Critters Hiding in Other Words.

Chapter 19: Word Gaffes: When Words Trip Us Up.

Chapter 22: Extralongitudinal Linguistifabulatons.

 

    I liked the writing style.  The author assumes the reader is a word enthusiast, but doesn’t have a PhD in Linguistics.  The text is by necessity scholarly, yet it is also easy for us recreational wordsmiths to understand.

 

    The chapters are separated into three parts.  Part One, The Oddities of English Etymology, introduces the reader to the technical aspects of Etymology.  Part Two, Twist and Turns, presents chapters dealing with specific etymological wordlists, such as Colors, Food, Astronomy,  Seasons/Months, etc.  Part Three, Whimsy and Wonder, is a delightful collection of offbeat words, silly vocabulary, slang, and incredibly lengthy words.

 

    I was happy to see one of my favorite dictionary terms, “Dord” get mentioned.  Ditto for Interrobangs, Aardwolves, and Grawlix, and a word of recent origin, Vellichor.  I agree with the author, the obsolete term “Slangwhanger” needs to be restored to everyday language.  And I appreciated inclusion of a quote from one of my favorite authors, Terry Pratchett.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.7/5 based on 143 ratings and 39 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.17/5 based on 303 ratings and 173 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    Just like other collocated verb phrases we looked at, none of these is set in stone.  But they’ve become so commonplace that they’re difficult to avoid.  Try coming up with different versions of a few and see how they sound to you.  “Explode into tears” is less common and might evoke a different mental image than “burst into tears.”  And “awfully ill-prepared” isn’t found as frequently as “woefully ill-prepared” despite meaning  more or less the same thing.  (pg. 57)

 

    Scuttlebutt, a nautical-inspired term for gossip, rumors, and interpersonal news shared among coworkers, dates to the early 1800s and is quite literally the sailor’s equivalent of “watercooler talk.”  A “scuttlebutt” was a cask of fresh drinking water kept aboard a ship, around which sailors loitered and chattered much as they might around the watercooler in an office break room.  (pg. 261)

 

Kindle Details…

    Useless Etymology sells for $9.99 at Amazon at present.  Jess Zafarris has two other etymology-themed e-books available: Words from Hell and Once Upon a Word; both of which are in the $8–$9 range, plus another two tomes that are in the works but which you can already pre-order.

 

 

“I would there was a blister on this plaguy tongue of mine for making such a hollo-ballo.”  (pg. 7) (*)

    I only noticed four instances of profanity in Useless Etymology, and one of those was there because the etymology of “shit” was being addressed.

 

    Some of the early, more technical chapters have lots of footnotes.  For the most part, they reference the literary source being quoted in the text (which, after all, is the main purpose of footnotes), so if that doesn't interest you, they can be ignored.  In later chapters, some of the footnotes gave added insight to the text, so when you’re about halfway through the book, you might want to start reading them.

 

    I can’t think of anything else to quibble about.  For me, Useless Technology was a great read, on a subject I immensely love learning more about.  Word Nerds of the world unite!  We have nothing to lose but our linguistic ignorance!

 

    9½ Stars.  One last thing.  The tagline above marked with an asterisk (*) is from a book by Tobias Smollett, titled “The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves”, published in 1762, and cited here for its etymological forerunner of hullaballoo.  I’m amazed at how “ancient” that sentence sounds.  I think I might go find that novel and read it.

Language and Responsibility - Noam Chomsky

   1975; 192 pages.  New Author? : No.  Interviewer: Mitsou Ronat.  Genres : Linguistics; Interviews; Language.  Overall Rating : 6*/10.

 

    Hey, let’s read a book about Linguistics, the study of Languages.  I know the difference between an etymologist and an entomologist, and do crossword puzzles, so how difficult can it be?

 

    And I’m not messing around with any third-rate vocabularian (yeah, that’s a real word; it’s just very uncommon); I’m going to read something by the grammar guru himself, Noam Chomsky.  He’s written more than 50 books about Linguistics over the course of 60+ years.  I’m sure he knows what he’s talking about.

 

    Besides, how difficult can a study of languages be?  You just look up the history of a bunch of words, assemble them into a coherent system, and voila!  You’ve got yourself a book on linguistics, amiright?  Let’s open one of Chomsky’s books, Language and Responsibility, and see what jumps out at us.

 

    Omigosh!  What the heck is Syntactic Structure??

 

What’s To Like...

    Language and Responsibility is divided into nine sections, plus an introductory “Translator’s Note” (see the end of this review).  The sections are:

    01. Politics

    02. Linguistics and the Human Sciences

    03. A Philosophy of Language

    04. Empiricism and Rationalism

    05. The Birth of Generative Grammar

    06. Semantics

    07. The Extended Standard Theory

    08. Deep Structure

    09. Universal Grammar and Unresolved Questions

My favorite chapters are highlighted in blue.  Yours may vary.

 

    The book is mostly formatted as several interviews by Mitsou Ronat, posing questions to Noam Chomsky, but frankly, it felt scripted to me.  That’s okay though, the other book I’ve read of Chomsky’s, reviewed here, was in the same format, so maybe this is the style that Noam is most comfortable with.

 

      The vocabulary is challenging.  I struggled to understand terms such as Syntactic Structures, Phonological, Generative Grammar, Anaphoric Relations, Logical Form, Deep Structures, Generative Semantics, and Sociolinguistics, just to name a few.  To be fair though, my Spellchecker app took a look at that list, and said it was familiar with all of them.

 

    As you’d expect in a scholarly presentation, there are a bunch of footnotes.  The numerical ones reference the cited writings and can be ignored unless you want to find and read the original papers.  The alphabetic ones give further discussion of the topic, and/or the translating challenges encountered.  Those are definitely worth your time.

 

    I enjoyed learning the history of universities gradually adding Linguistics graduate classes to their curriculum.  Noam Chomsky apparently was a key catalyst in that endeavor.  The “Politics” chapter might seem to be off-topic, but it gives readers new to Noam Chomsky a glimpse at what to expect in his many books on that subject.  And it was fun to see just how much debate can be generated in trying to understand the “Deep” in the phrase “Deep Structures”.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.5/5 based on 307 ratings and 28 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.81/5 based on 1,074 ratings and 60 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    Noam Chomsky: These empiricist hypotheses have very little plausibility, in my opinion, it does not seem possible to account for the development of commonsense understanding of the physical and social world, or science, in terms of processes of induction, generalization, abstraction, and so on.  There is no such direct path from data that are given to intelligible theories.  (pg. 69)

 

    Noam Chomsky: Many structural languages and many philosophers—Quine, for example—claimed that grammar concepts must be defined on the basis of scientific notions.  For example, that the concept of phoneme must be defined in terms of synonymy . . .

    Mitsou Ronat:  Which means saying that r and l are different phonemes because ramp and lamp don’t have the same meaning . . .

    Noam Chomsky: Yes, that’s one example.  (pg. 136)

 

Kindle Details…

    Language and Responsibility is half of a two-book Kindle bundle titled On Language, which Amazon describes as “some of Noam Chomsky’s most informal and highly accessible work.”  I will read and review each book separately.  The e-book bundle costs $14.99 right now.  ANAICT Language and Responsibility is not available separately in e-book format, so the Ratings given above are for the bundle.

 

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.  (pg. 137)

   Needless to say, there aren’t any cusswords or R-rated stuff in Language and Responsibility.  There were a number of typos, mostly involving spacing or punctuation, but these looked like they occurred at the Publishing stage.

 

    I found the writing style somewhat vague.  Time and again Chomsky expresses his disagreement with tenets put forth by other linguists.  That’s okay, but he doesn’t provide any specifics, and, like most readers, I’m not familiar with the other linguists’ work and am not motivated to read their treatises just to confirm Chomsky’s critiques.

 

    But the big problem I had with the book was its rationales, and it is best exemplified by noting a phrase which occurs ten times in the text: “a priori”.  Which means, and I quote, “knowledge, reasoning, or assumptions formed independently of experience, observation, or experimentation. It relies on logic, deduction, and intuition to determine truths before investigating the facts”.

 

    In other words, conclusions are presented as valid without any examples or facts needed, as long as you can formulate a logical argument.  Noam Chomsky has a low regard for Empiricism.  See the first excerpt, above, for proof of this.  I’m a scientist by trade, which means I’m an empiricist, which means I have a high esteem of empiricism.

 

    Despite those drawbacks, I liked Language and Responsibility.  I’ve read and enjoyed several books about the history of the English language, but the truth is I know little or nothing about the mechanics of Linguistics.  I’m hoping I just picked the wrong Noam Chomsky book to start with, as I have two more sitting on my Kindle.

 

    6 Stars.  One last thing.  The book’s “Introduction” section notes that the text was subjected to two translations.  It started in English (1976), was translated into French (1977), and then for whatever reason was translated back into English (1979).  You’d think that means the text ended up back in its original form, but apparently that wasn’t the case.  Sheesh.

The Adventure of English - Melvyn Bragg

   2011; 336 pages.  Full Title : The Adventure of English – The Biography of a Language.  New Author? : Yes.    Genre : Non-Fiction; Linguistics.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

    When you think about it, it really is remarkable that English has become the dominant language around the world.

    It started out as an immigrant tongue when a couple of Germanic tribes, most notably the Jutes and the Angles, hopped across the English Channel to a sparsely populated, nondescript island that the Romans had abandoned due to lack of importance.  It nestled in among the existent Celtic tribal dialects and made itself at home.

    It somehow avoided being subsumed by those native tongues, survived the relentless raids by the Vikings, laid low during the  French-speaking Norman Conquest, and whispered softly while the church insisted on conducting its business only in Latin.

    All along, it borrowed liberally from each of those languages, ever increasing its vocabulary, until it was ready to travel to exotic, faraway places.  Like the West Indies, India, Australia, and the most uncivilized setting of them all – America.

What’s To Like...

    The Adventure of English – The Biography of a Language is a fascinating opus by Melvyn Bragg, a well-known producer of television documentaries in the United Kingdom.  As the book’s title implies, he anthropomorphizes (I had to look up the verb form of that word) the English language, giving it a personality and appetite for new words, the latter coming in two forms – imported and homegrown.  But don’t worry; at its core, this is a meticulously researched history of our (well, England’s, actually) mother tongue.

    The book is divided into 24 chapters, and can be divided into four sections.  The first chapter deals with “where English came from”.  The next 17 chapters center on how and why foreign words flowed into it (English really is a polyglot).  After that, the focus shifts to English flowing out into the rest of the world.  And we finish up with speculation on “where do we go from here?”

    Melvyn Bragg writes in “English”, as opposed to what I call “American”, and somehow that seems eminently appropriate for the subject material.  Yes, this is the story of how our language – both written and spoken – came to be.  But it is also the story of England itself, and for me, predictably, the older the time period being examined, the more interesting the chapter.  Also included are a fair amount of pictures, and I found these to be interesting as well.

    If you a fan of historical and/or linguistic trivia, you’ll love this book.  Among the items I noted are 8^th-century riddles (quite well done), a brief mention of Pennsylvania Dutch, the Cockney dialect and its consequent rhyming slang, and just how perilous the English language’s existence was during the Norman era.

    In addition you’ll meet a number of fascinating historical figures and learn how they contributed to the English language.  Among them: Chaucer, John Wycliffe, Philip Sidney (who?),  Robert Burns, Charles Dickens, and our own Mark Twain.  An entire chapter is devoted to Shakespeare, and rightfully so.  You’ll learn some of the more than 2000 new words he personally added to the vocabulary, including his longest one, “honorificabilitudinitatibus”, which means “the state of being able to achieve honors”, and even has its own Wikipedia entry, linked here.

 Kewlest New Word ...

Scotticism (n.) : a characteristically Scottish phrase.  (There’s a Wikipedia entry for this too.  See it here).

Others : Apotheosis (n.); Fructify (v.)

Excerpts...

    The average educated man today, more than four hundred years on from Shakespeare with the advantage of hundreds of thousands of new words that have come in since his time, has a working vocabulary of less than half that of Shakespeare.

    The language at that time was in flux: Shakespeare must have made it dizzy.  He “out-Heroded Herod”; “uncle me no uncle,” he said, he would “dog them at the heels” – just one of the astonishing, simple transferences of a common observation, a dog at someone’s heels, into a phrase which could be menacing, funny, admirable, pestering: and it is clinchingly memorable.  (loc. 2248)

    Dnt u sumX rekn eng lang v lngwindd?  2 mny wds & ltrs?  ?nt we b usng lss time & papr?  ? we b 4wd tnking + txt?  13 yr grl frim w scot 2ndry schl sd ok.  Sh rote GCSE eng as (abt hr smmr hols in NY) in txt spk.  (NO!) Sh sd sh 4t txt spk was “easr thn standard eng.”  Sh 4t hr tcher wd b :)  Hr tcher 4t it was nt so gr8!  Sh was :( & talkd 2 newspprs (but askd 2 b anon).  “I cdnt bleve wot I was cing!  :o” -!-!-! OW2TE.  Sh hd NI@A wot grl was on abut.  Sh 4t her pupl was ritng in “hieroglyphics.”  (loc. 4850)

Kindle Details...

    The Adventure of English sells for $9.99 at Amazon, although I picked it up when it was temporarily discounted.  Melvyn Bragg has several other books available for the Kindle, both fiction and nonfiction.  They run from $11.49 to $15.12 .  Most of the books he’s penned over the years are only available in paperback and hardcover.

 “The masculine pronouns are he, his and him; but imagine the feminine she, shis and shim!”  (loc. 1578)

    I don’t really have any quibbles about The Adventure of English.  The worst I can say is that there are a bunch of word lists, particularly when Melvyn Bragg is demonstrating just how many words English has absorbed from other languages.  They can get tedious, and I admit I skimmed over some of these.  But they are indispensable for Bragg making his point about just how much of a sponge our language is.

    There are a number of times where an “old English” passage was placed side-by-side with its modern English equivalent.  I found these mesmerizing, and I wondered just how the audiobook version handles this.  Are the two passages spoken for comparison’s sake?  If so, is this more effective than seeing them written, or less?  I’ll never know because I tried an audiobook once and was thoroughly discombobulated by it, giving up after a couple pages.

    Finally, it should be noted that the e-book ends at 90%.  This is expected with any reference work, and the final 10% is taken up by the author’s acknowledgements, an extensive bibliography, and an index that contains neither page numbers nor links.

    9½ Stars.  Bottom line: if you’re into history, you’ll like this book.  If you’re into the English language, you’ll like this book.  And if you’re into the history of the English language (like I am), you’ll freaking love this book.