So, to get it out of the way here, this is not a paid post or an affiliate link or anything, just something amazingly cool that I ran across today and have been reading voraciously. Reading the OED is a truly hilarious book documenting a year in one completely insane man’s life. He read the entire OED, people. It’s twenty volumes. I love words, and I can’t even imagine what this would be like to undertake. Anyway, a Mr. Ammon Shea is braver than I, and his book is really a Cliff’s Notes version for anyone who has ever toyed with the idea of reading it, but can’t quite manage to get to it. It contains such gems as the one in the blog title, and many many others.
What is truly fascinating about this book is not just the weird words, but how many strange ideas we have expressed in English over the years. There are words in the OED which express concepts that we’ve never really tried to verbalize, but make perfect sense once we see them. And then, there are words that mean “to annoy with missionaries”. It makes you wonder about people.
English is a fascinating, weird, culturally confused, and psychologically revealing language. Because we’ve borrowed from so many other cultures in creating our language, the words that have survived really speak to who we are, both now and in the past. This book does a great job of exploring that in a format that won’t give you a headache.
Although now, if they released an OED for Kindle…I might be tempted.
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