Where I Learned a Lot About Very Little

The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English by Henry Hitchings
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this about 10 years ago, stretched out over a long period of time. Didn't much like it, but I finished it. Gave it 3 stars.

Then I forgot I read it. Zero memory of the book. Bought it again at a thrift store. Paperback, this time. (To be fair, I'm a bit of an idiot. Also, I've read tons of books about the origins of English. One of my favorite subjects.)

So now, I read it again, all the way through, and guess what?

Didn't ring any bells. None of it. And I still didn't like it. Yes, many little stories within are interesting, like a series of clever blog posts, but his purpose is so scattered and varied that I don't know what the big picture is meant to be. I never got it.

Here's my review: the author gives a thousand word origins, offering hundreds of opinions, making hundreds of claims on many topics within the general history of English. With the author, we meander through the centuries, across the globe, seeing pieces of the story of English, and many curious sources for random bits of vocabulary, and are treated to a discussion of many cultural forces that had an impact on the language. Nothing, however, is done in a thorough or exhaustive way. It feels like English is a whole broad landscape, and it would make sense if we looked up and described it in a holistic way, but we don't see any of that because we're keeping our eyes down, looking at random shells and stones and insects he's pointing at because he thinks they are curious and fun.

I really wanted some introductory paragraphs. Maybe a topic sentence here and there with the main idea. We don't get that. Every page and every paragraph can be about a different thing.

Every chapter I asked myself, "What is his point?" In its absence, I kept hoping there would be a summary at the end, maybe a conclusion drawing it all together. "Here with these thousands of bits of data," I hoped he'd say, "we can make this sweeping generalization, or these five important points that make sense of all that information." Nope. None of that.

Instead, the book is just a thousand separate points, like "Here are some words that came from Dutch." It's interesting when we learn that words from mining, like cobalt, quartz, shale, gneiss and zinc, all come from German. Cool. Good to know. But then he also tells us that's also the source for bergschrund, thalweg, and geest.

Excuse me?

He did that many times. For example, some cool words came from the Great Exhibition of 1851, like saxophone, lorry, and hydromechanics. But other words from that same event that didn't catch on are dhoop, hyawaballi, and jusi.

I don't get it. Why tell us that? It cost me some energy trying to fit his information into some kind of schema, and I'm annoyed because I just couldn't do it.

At times, he expresses strong opinions, mostly one-offs at the end of paragraphs that he never returns to, like a professor in a lecture throwing out his opinions to an audience that will never demand he prove his points because he's already gone on to something else. A few times, he went further than that. For example, he makes a more concerted effort to rail against the language of "political correctness," which he claims is about demonstrating moral purity more than about accomplishing anything useful. He goes on to say:

This cultural sensitivity, which tends to be most visible in academia and social work, can mutate into patronizing tokenism, a licence for political ineptitude or inertia, and a grotesque repression of personal freedoms. At its most extreme, political correctness is capable of destroying family life and rewriting history.

What? How? What in the world are you talking about?

He doesn't explain. He just leaves it hanging out there.

In general, I could not figure out where he was going. What is the main point? It felt like he aimed at more than anecdote, at something more significant, but I'm not getting it.

And I tried two times.

(Check with me in 2035 or so. Maybe third time's the charm.)

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