The greatest invention ever (at least for 50,000 years or so)

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, english language, words, logophilia

I can't report such a book without some paraphrases & quotes:

• Each year about 5,000 new words enter or are coined in the English language. (p40)
• From H.D. Thoreau: "Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all." (p151, in the chapter Bookmobility)
• From John Cheever: "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library!" (p156, in A Celebration of Libraries)
• From V. Alexandrov: "Language is the greatest achievement of culture; poetry is the greatest achievement of language." (p163, in What is Poetry?)
• Of writing poetry yourself, "The place to begin is with yourself. If your poems are to be sincere, they should be fashioned from the raw material of your experience..." (p167)
• From A. Quiller-Couch: "If your language is confused, your intellect, if not your whole character, will almost certainly correspond. (p 211)

Richard Lederer loves language. His new book The Miracle of Language invites us to read his love-letters to words and language.

This is fond to my heart, as I do also. The earliest memories of my next-youngest brother and myself are of finding a "Table of Alphabets" in our family encyclopedia and spending hours copying letters of the Sumerian, Greek, Amharic and other scripts.

Our careers sprang from this, as he became a calligrapher then a student of language—now a Mayan archaeologist—, while I work with the meanings of words and the relationships among them: in a hierarchy of concepts, "rust" is a species of "corrosion", but does "corrosion" come under "chemical attack" or vice versa...or are they siblings under something greater, as corrosion can involve biochemistry? At a lecture my brother gave on the artwork in the Book of Kells, a wag who knew of my Bible expertise cracked, "M-- and L-- both study the Bible: one the form, the other its content."

Lederer had a choice when he planned his book. He has the expertise to write a lengthy, comprehensive, scholarly tome. He made the happier choice to seek clarity in brevity, and has produced a book of just the right size: broad in scope, enough so to be called comprehensive, yet concise and to the point. Meaty without being overwhelming.

(I am thus reminded of my decades of reading Stephen Jay Gould's books. Very readable, and as a group covering all aspects of natural science. Then, I got a copy of his mammoth The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. 1400 pages! I am capable of reading half a hundred pages a year, with any understanding. So it'll sit on my nightstand until I am at least 80. Should Lederer produce a monster tome, I'd likely give it a go...but so glad this book isn't.)

Lederer is an essayist, a columnist. Many of the chapters in Miracle are from his columns. I love essays. They are polished gems, where a novel is more of an inlaid or mosaicked mural. In them, we hover with him over scenes in which language is used and misused—shown with particular beauty in an essay on George Orwell—, crafted, created, and variously made to pull its weight or pull us down.

He likes to quote others, which made it rather hard for me to find good bites of his own text to present. There is but one in the list of quotes above (it's next to last). His last chapter "Words about words" consists of an introductory page followed by thirty pages of quotes. He calls it "A Gallimaufry for Word Lovers". How can one not love words? Whether spoken or in print, they are indeed, not only "mightier than the sword," but the source of sword and plowshare alike.