Omnibus Review No.2

kw: book reviews, grammar, etymology, nonfiction, ecology, science fiction, humor

Another week had to pass, and I've read four books. Seems using a computer all day, when it gets intense, to do so at home also is like a busman's holiday. Well, that's another story.

• Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme, also subtitled The seamy and quirky stories behind favorite nursery rhumes: a collection of "the real stories," or as real as can be known, by Chris Roberts.
• Word Origins...and how we know them, also subtitled Etymology for Everyone: a modest collection of the conceptual tools used to discern words' histories, by Anatoly Leiberman.
• Tree: a Life Story, a natural history of one conceptual Douglas Fir by David Susuki and Wayne Grady.
• Only You Can Save Mankind, science fiction, firmly tongue-in-cheek, by Terry Pratchett.

The two "words" books are much different from one another. The first presents entertaining histories that are known, conjectured, or speculated to have led to about forty familiar nursery rhymes, and some that led to groups of similar rhymes, such as lullabies. I've long wondered why "Rock-a-bye Baby" ends with the baby falling out of a tree. You won't quite learn exactly why, here, but you'll get food for thought about it.

I've long realized that stories of dragons, elves, sprites, and the knights in shining armor that overcome them, or become subject to their tricks, are about inner battles: one day I realized that the dragon is me, the knight is me, and the captive damsel is also me; I cried a long time. Other stories, about ogres, trolls, and giants, recall the terror of learning to get along with larger kids, older siblings, and parents, who were not always exactly pleased with us.

But nursery rhymes, most often, seem to be kids' ways of coping with unconquerable forces, or of making fun of the grown-up hypocrites around them. Author Roberts has dug up quite a set of interesting history for our enjoyment.

Dr. Liberman's book is a much more difficult read. I find linguists' tools fascinating, but it is easy for me to see that it would take a number of the precious few years I have left to gain any facility with them. In the end, I find etymology a bit like playing 'Tetris'. With a handful of exceptions, we don't know the 'original origin' of a word. Rather, we determine, say, that STAND and quite a number of ST- words (STAY, STEAD, STABLE...) come from a Greek root meaning "fixed" or "held steady". We may even find an older word that the Greek came from, but we know we'll probably never find out if ST- goes back to the origins of speech in the 1000th Century BCE. In the end, a Tetris block will get you. But it's pretty cool to see how linguists dig out the relationships. Cool and strenous.

Suzuki and Grady have produced a lyric proem to a Douglas Fir (they use the term Douglas-fir, because the tree is not a real fir, but a false cypress), tracing its history from the fall of seeds centuries ago, through maturity, ending in its inability to overcome the depredations of predatory beetles, becoming first a snag, then a fallen giant, finally a nurse log for a row of hemlocks. Along the way they open little windows into many facets of Earth history and ecological studies. As close as I've come to a kind of empathy with a forest giant. This is the second time I've read the book.

Terry Pratchett writes well enough to entertain me in six or seven subgenres of Science Fiction. This book plays off the 1992 Gulf War and its obsessive TV coverage against video games, as the latter get more real, until the young gamester Johnny finds the line between game and world getting rather blurry. From one angle, it is a solipsist permabulation. But mainly it is a humorous romp through the half-real world of "virtual reality," which we find is getting more real-seeming daily. My favorite series of Pratchett's is the Discworld saga.