Useless Etymology
Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds
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٤٫٣ - ٣ من التقييمات
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- 9٫99 US$
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- 9٫99 US$
وصف الناشر
"A burst of delight on every page!"
Mignon Fogarty, host of the Grammar Girl podcast
Did you know that an "astronaut" is literally a "star sailor," that a thesaurus is, in fact, a "treasure
trove" of words, and that someone who is "sinister" is actually just "left-handed"?
Have you ever wondered why English isn't considered a Romance language if 60% of our
words are Latin-derived?
Did Shakespeare really invent 1,700 words, and if not, why the heck do we say that he did?
Why is the English language stuffed with so many synonyms?
Let's be real: English can seem pretty bonkers. And, well, sometimes it is. But through thorough thought and a pinch of curiosity, method can be found within the madness of our modern tongue-even within the disparate pronunciation of the words "through," "thorough," and "thought."
Derived from Germanic, Romance, Hellenic, Semitic, African and Native American languages, English contains multitudes. It has been (and continues to be) transformed by war and conquest, art and literature, science and technology, love and hate, wit and whim.
Useless Etymology takes readers on a time-traveling adventure to unlock the beauty, wonder, and absurdity within our everyday words, how they came to be, and the unexpected ways their origins weave a global, cross-cultural labyrinth of meaning.
Filled with fun facts and delightful discoveries, this is an enlightening read for anyone who wants to know more about why the English language works the way that it does.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This addictive compendium of lexical lore from podcaster and social media personality Zafarris (Words from Hell) aims to give readers "something to laugh or sigh or rage at on every page." Some of her etymological origin stories are silly, others enthralling, and still others just plain surprising, like that of trivia, which comes from a Latin word meaning "a place where three roads meet"; in the Holy Roman Empire, Zafarris explains, such three-way intersections were places where people hung out making small talk about matters trivial. Zafarris's account is full of such marvelous facts—but not factoids, she's careful to point out, a term which was coined by Norman Mailer to denote modern journalism's proliferation of sound bites and platitudes that actually have no basis in reality. "Etymology gives you superpowers," she quips, and readers may very well feel a sense of superhuman enlightenment while processing the fact that which was originally a compound word (the Old English for "why like"). After all, Zafarris writes, "the more you learn, the less pedantic you become and the more you revel in the glorious, rip-roaring chaos of iterative creativity." Word lovers will adore Zafarris's wit and whimsy.
