Like the river, you can't step in twice

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

I am not one of the twitterati. I do not have a Twitter account. I have trouble enough keeping up with FaceBook and this blog! As it happens, twittersphere is the 100th word in The Story of English in 100 Words by David Crystal. He chose it to exemplify the continued liveliness of English, or "the Englishes" if you accept that certain patois and pidgins have become new English languages (a Chinese friend who had lived in Malaysia explained it to me: Malay pidgin is English words strung together using Chinese grammar. Thus, "Long time no see" is an exact translation of a Chinese phrase into the corresponding English words. Remember that the next time you read a product brochure written in Chinglish.).

The language alternately called Old English or Anglo-Saxon arose in the late Fifth and early Sixth Century, an amalgam of the tongues spoken by the Germanic Angle, Saxon and Jute invaders who pretty much took over the island that now holds England, Scotland and Wales. To this day, nearly 80% of everyday English words are of Germanic origin. Of course, if you count scientific and technical words, you get a larger proportion of Latin and Greek terms, but less than 30% of the population is scientifically or technically trained, so you can hardly call them "everyday".

True to this origin, Professor Crystal's compendium begins with a Fifth Century word, roe. The word referred to the roe-deer, not to fish eggs. That came much later, via another word of similar sound. Very few words of such ancient lineage survive, however. The book's second selection is from the Eighth Century. By my count, the author spread his collection over the centuries thus:

• 5: 1
• 8: 2
• 9: 5
• 10: 5
• 11: 2
• 12: 1
• 13: 9
• 14: 9
• 15: 2
• 16: 8 (The century of Shakespeare)
• 17: 13 (The century of the King James Bible)
• 18: 4
• 19: 13
• 20: 21
• 21: 5

I pride myself on a comprehensive knowledge of the language (that is, a large vocabulary), but a few of the words were unknown to me: bodgery (16th, since replaced by "bungling"), mipela (19th, from a Papuan pidgin; the intensive plural of "me"), doobry (early 20th, akin to "whatzits"), and bagonize (late 20th, waiting at baggage claim). In many of the essays, a dozen or more, perhaps 50-100, words that in some way relate are also mentioned. Thus doobry is accompanied by doodad, doofer, dooshanks, and also doohickey, doojigger, and then whatchacallit, whatchamacallit, thingy, thingummy, jigmaree, and a good many others. All just to say, "I don't know what to call it, but I know what I am looking for".

If you dig into almost any word's origin and history, you'll find surprises. The common epithet "Dude!" just means what "guy" meant a decade or so ago, but it referred to a cowboy wannabe when I was a child, and to a dandy (today we'd say "metrosexual") when the word first appeared in 1883. Like many new coinages, once it caught on, it spawned a number of related words and phrases such as duded up. The author mentions the short tenure of the female forms dudine and dudess. Here I can happily add to the author's knowledge: the proper female form, when used at all, is dudette (at least for now!).

Word play is a fruitful source of new words. Brunch is a portmanteau word, packing two meanings into one word (as Humpty Dumpty explained to Alice). Dally (from "delay") spun off dilly-dally by reduplication, which led to a host of words bearing a similar rhythm. And then there are attempts to deal with ambiguity. The pronoun "you" is both singular and plural. In the American South, y'all and a number of variants arose originally as a plural "you". The trouble is, it soon became equally ambiguous, and at least around Houston when I lived there 35 years ago, y'all just meant "you, singular", and all y'all or all-a-you-all was the plural form. And they really did say "Y'all come back now, hear?", no matter how many people were saying goodbye.

Leaving out the millions of terms such as Homo sapiens or Tyrannosaurus rex or E. coli (who knows how to pronounce "Escherichia" anyway?) that refer to specific biological species, there are still about a million words of English. Summarizing them in 100 exemplars is no small task. The good professor has done a masterful survey of the ways that words were coined and cobbled together, and dragged, cajoled and kidnapped into the English language, to form the very living tongue spoken, in numerous variants and dialects, by a third of the peoples of the Earth.

Unwinding Babel

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, language, english language, globalism

About half the members of the church I attend are Chinese, both "mainlanders" and Taiwanese. Though they all speak Mandarin, it is not everyone's first language. At a church lunch I might hear four or five Chinese dialects in use. The rest of the congregation consists of those, like me, whose first language is English. Church meetings and business sessions are conducted in English. However, when speaking to the group, I unconsciously speak a simpler English, adjusted to more closely match the vocabulary of them all.

At work, some of my colleagues are Indian, American citizens born in India. Several other colleagues with whom I sometimes interact are in India, at the other end of a video conference link or Skype call. I don't need to adjust my language much with any of them, but I have noticed signs of some of them digging out English terms to express concepts that, among themselves, they have a local word for. At least four Indian language groups are represented among them, so even though they also all speak Hindi as a second or third language, their English facility is better, and that is how business is carried out, in Indian-accented English.

Nearly none of my wife's family can speak English, but some of her childhood friends do. With them, we can speak ordinary American English; they learned from American servicemen and their spouses. But their children and grandchildren all speak "Japanglish" (more recently termed Janglish) among themselves, and can effortlessly switch to a lightly-accented English if they need to talk to me (not that they much care to).

Robert McCrum would tell me these are varieties of Globish, the new world language. The title of his new book (just a year out) is Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language. His thesis is simple, that a few accidents of history, and the recent immense spread of the World Wide Web starting as an English language phenomenon, catapulted this word-gobbling, culture-flattening German/French hybrid tongue into global hegemony. Though twice as many earthlings speak Mandarin as a first language, more than half of all of us, four billion, speak English as a second or first language.

Simple though the thesis may be, the process was sinuous as a burnt python. Starting with the confluence of invader languages and native Celtic in the 5^th Century, Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, quickly developed as the primary tongue of Britain. The breakup of the Roman Empire had resulted in the rapid eclipse of Latin as anything but a scholar's language. A few generations of Norman rule starting in 1066 AD nearly doubled the vocabulary as the British subjects of Norman overlords were required to learn new words for everything, but kept their old language for converse among themselves. A similar phenomenon continues wherever there is a servant class; just go to the Jamaican section of Baltimore, where you'll hear little English but plenty of Patois being spoken, though they speak English clearly enough when at work. In Norman England, the Anglo-Saxon of the servant class was sufficiently robust to survive and become Middle English, even though a nearly total overlay of "upper class" French words had been added to the mix.

King Henry V was the first to use (Middle) English instead of Latin or Norman in all his documents. Not for nothing did Shakespeare put a rousing English rallying cry in his mouth as he prepared his troops for battle on St. Crispin's Day (what King Harry actually said is, of course, not known, except that it was in English). In this, Henry was, perhaps consciously, recapitulating Alfred the Great, who used the vernacular hundreds of years earlier to rally his people, including his commissioning of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle. As Alfred's influence catapulted Anglo-Saxon back into a national tongue, so Henry did for Middle English at a crucial time.

We still retain memorials of the transition of Middle English into Early Modern English—Chaucer, Shakespeare and the Geneva Bible—and then Modern English, with the Authorized Version (King James Bible) on the cusp of the transition. Though spelling conventions have changed, making KJV English hard to read in a first or second edition, the spoken word has changed less (barring 400 years of neologisms), so that you'd be able to understand William Shakespeare well enough, were he to pay us a visit to discuss his life and work.

What is it that makes English such a robust language? In a word, flexibility. English is the great borrower. It exemplifies the entrepreneur's ethic: Why create what you can freely appropriate? While the French are struggling to find "honest" French expressions for the one-quarter of modern Franglish that was borrowed from English and other languages, English has grown to have a vocabulary of more than a million words, as collected by the Oxford English Dictionary. It requires only 10,000 words or so to become a fluent speaker of most modern languages. Any English-speaking fourth grader has a vocabulary exceeding 30,000 words, and the college-educated population knows 50,000 to 80,000 words. About a fifth of these make up the Anglo-Saxon/Norman core that fills our daily conversation, and many of the rest are borrowings of various vintages.

A most fortunate circumstance for the spread of English worldwide was England's loss of the American colonies in the 1776-1814 period. England turned to worldwide Empire building, and within a century, Great Britain and her empire girdled the globe and acculturated more than a billion people to her language and customs. Then two world wars came along, in which the Anglophone powers, the U.S. and England, became the closest of collaborators. One result was the breakup of the British Empire into the British Commonwealth plus a number of English-speaking former colonies. Another was the Marshall Plan, which has morphed into half the world's nations hosting clusters of American troops, whose English language spreads from every American base outward throughout those nations (this last sentence is my addition to McCrum's otherwise comprehensive historical review).

Just at such a juncture, technology intervened to produce a class of perfect electronic servants. When I first obtained a desktop computer in 1981, I knew that 90% of all keystrokes on PC's were word processing. PC's replaced typesetting equipment almost overnight; they replaced typewriters shortly thereafter, once printers got cheap (though my IBM ProPrinter, at $600, doesn't seem cheap now, it was quite a bit less than $7,000 laser printers of the time). The early 1990s saw the World Wide Web sweep over the Internet/DARPAnet and turn it into a global library. Now it is becoming "the Cloud", and if you don't read or write English, you can get free translation to and from the language you prefer at Babelfish or Google Translate or several other venues. They are getting less clumsy all the time (BTW, when I correspond in French, I use GT to check my word choices and grammar).

The two largest nations on Earth are promoting English even more than the U.S. and England. The Indians of course are becoming the go-to-folks for technical service no matter where you happen to be. And their accents are getting better. India has a greater accent-reduction industry than Hollywood. The Chinese are teaching English almost universally, so even though Mandarin is spoken by a billion and a half people, you can now add half of them to those who can use fluent English, or actually Globish, for commerce.

The English language escaped England two hundred years ago, and now it is escaping America also. That is a good thing. The flow of language is two ways, and Globish is now the language with the greatest ability to gain new words for new concepts. As a result, English/Globish is the only language that really needs a Thesaurus. It will never be a concordant language. Today's situation was summarized by McCrum's colleague Alan Rusbridger at The Guardian thus:

1. There is no such thing as Abroad.
2. Most of our readers are 'foreign'.
3. They expect us to inform them about their own countries.
4. Their decisions will affect us.
5. No economy is an island.
6. 'They' will want to come here.
7. It matters in London what they teach in Lahore.
8. The environment is global.
9. Technology is global.
10. Their own media won't do this: but we will!

(Note on p 290). This is a journalist's view, but with minor tweaking it represents the environment in which all commerce finds itself. For the coming decade or two, native English speakers will have it a bit easier than most, but the spread of Globish continues to flatten the playing field. After all, it matters most if you have something to say, and the world is full of people with plenty to say, and they are getting better at saying it to everyone, everywhere.

Eleven ways to add a D

kw: words, english language

In a recent post, I showed that 95% of English verbs form the past tense by putting a "D" sound at the end. Here we'll look at the various ways that "D" sound is spelled, plus the sounds that are added to form the present participle, third person singular and associated noun. This will of necessity be presented in narrative form, because Blogger doesn't properly support tables.

In the lists I made of verb forms, I distinguished them into 42 categories by the patterns by which the past, past participle, present participle, third person singular, and related noun are formed. For the vast majority of English verbs, the past and past participle are the same: "Today I Start, earlier I Started, and I have Started many times." From this point, I'll show the full conjugations this way: Start//Started/Starts/Starting/Starter, where that // indicates that the two past forms are the same. In planned posts where I discuss verbs with a full conjugation, all the parts will be shown, as Swim/Swam/Swum/Swims/Swimming/Swimmer.

My numbering scheme was arrived at somewhat ad hoc. I reserved numbers less than ten (currently 0, 1 and 2) for those few verbs like Cut that re-use the infinitive in the past and/or past participle. The ones that use the "D" sound in past forms are numbered 10 through 20:

• 10: 2,748 verbs ending in "e" that add "d" to produce past forms, add "s" in the third person singular, change final "e" to "ing" for the present participle, and usually add "r" for the "performer" noun, though some change the final "e" to "or". Thus, Bribe//Bribed/Bribes/Bribing/Briber but Create//Created/Creates/Creating/Creator. For a few of these, the "r" or "or" form has become superseded by another form, such as Associate→Associate and Irritate→Irritant.
• 11: 2,538 verbs that add "ed for the past forms, "s" for the third person singular, "ing" for the present participle, and "er" (rarely "or") for the noun. Examples are Adorn//Adorned/Adorns/Adorning/Adorner and Obey//Obeyed/Obeys/Obeying/Obeyer.
• 12: 473 verbs whose final consonant is doubled before adding "ed" for the past forms and "ing" or "er", but still add a simple "s" for the third person singular. Examples are Brag//Bragged/Brags/Bragging/Bragger (though also Braggart) and Stun//Stunner/Stuns/Stunning/Stunner.
• 13: 374 verbs which are similar to Type 11 except for adding "es" for the third person singular. Examples are Bless//Blessed/Blesses/Blessing/Blesser and Crash//Crashed/Crashes/Crashing/Crasher.
• 14: 212 verbs ending in "y", for which the "y" is replaced with "ied" for the past forms, "ies" for third person singular, and "ier" for the noun, while simply adding "ing" for the present participle. Examples are Bury//Buried/Buries/Burying/Burier and Rally//Rallied/Rallies/Rallying/Rallyer.
• 15: 34 verbs ending in "e" that keep the "e" when adding "ing" for the present participle, but are otherwise formed like Type 10. An example is Dye//Dyed/Dyes/Dyeing/Dyer.
  
• 16: 8 verbs ending in "c" that add "s" for third person singular but append a "k" before "ed", "ing" or "er". An example is Frolic//Frolicked/Frolics/Frolicking/Frolicker.
• 17: 11 verbs ending in "ie" which add "d" and "s" as Type 10 but replace the "ie" with "ying" for the past participle and with "yer" for the noun. An example is Tie//Tied/Ties/Tying/Tyer.
• 18: 8 verbs for which the final consonant is always doubled. An examples is Gas//Gassed/Gasses/Gassing/Gasser.
• 19: 6 verbs ending in "y" that change the "y" to "ied" and "ies" but append "ing" and "er" for the past participle and noun forms. Examples are Try//Tried/Tries/Trying/Tryer and (this verb means to "jump or jerk in startlement") Shy//Shied/Shies/Shying/Shyer.
• 20: 15 verbs ending in "y" that follow the pattern of these examples: Pay//Paid/Pays/Paying/Payer and Say//Said/Says/Saying/Sayer.

The numbers total to 6,427 in my lists, or 95.2% of the 6,753 verbs that I have analyzed. I can see where I ought to regroup these so that all the verbs with an infinitive ending in "e" are together, those ending in "y" are together and so forth. That is a task for another day.

Note that, though there are these eleven ways the spelling is taken care of, the endings of the spoken forms all sound the same: Creating and Bragging and Trying just add an "ing" sound; Sensed and Rallied and Picnicked just add a "d" sound. So the spoken conjugation of 95% of English verbs is quite regular.

Not so irregular as one might imagine

kw: words, english language

An interest of mine that has been neglected thus far is words and how they work. Many years ago, I had sufficient free time to gather and categorize about 100,000 words, beginning with the construction of my own spelling dictionary but going quite a bit farther. Along the way, I found that there are two conflicting ways "word" is used.

Most of the time, "word" means a string of letters with a particular meaning and sound. In this usage, "start" and "started" and "starting" are thought of as different words, as are "hurricane" and "hurricanes". When one studies languages, however, "start" is considered a word that occurs in different forms due to inflection, as guided by the historical "rules" of grammar. Children learn to say, "Today I START, yesterday I STARTED, and I have often STARTED before." They also learn that while you and I START, he, she and it STARTS. Take off the ED, the ING or the S, and we have the "root word".

Every time I studied a language, whether Latin or French or Japanese, I was told that they were more "consistent" than English in some regard. This came to mind recently, and I decided to do a little checking. After all, I have my word-usage databases, lying fallow for half my life.

So today I'll consider English regular verbs. Some wags say there aren't any, which is what makes English hard to learn. My verb tables show a different picture. They contain the conjugations for 6,753 roots, which expand into about 33,000 "words". "Start", for example, produces STARTS, STARTED, STARTING, and STARTER (the latter is the -er noun form, which nearly every verb has. That is one reason there are more nouns than verbs).

START is an example of the most common of English verbs, in which the past tense and past participle forms are produced by appending ED. About 40% of English verbs work this way. Another near-40% work by simply adding D to words that already end in a vowel, such as CHASE. There are a few minor ways of appending a D or ED while deleting or doubling a final letter, that bring the total to 95% of all English verbs. If we treat English another inflected language, the two methods (adding ED or D) would be the "first conjugation" and "second conjugation" of English verbs. the other ways of adding the D sound would be considered variants. Then, even if you call all other verb forms "irregular", they total only 5% of English verbs. That is pretty small, smaller than the number of French or German irregular verbs!

I'll defer to another day writing of verbs that show other patterns, and thus could be grouped as third and successive conjugations. A final quibble while I close for the day: The Wikipedia article Verbs uses "write" for its examples. "Write" is an example of a much less common conjugation, using the pattern WRITE, WROTE, WRITTEN, plus WRITES, WRITING, and WRITER. A more regular verb such as "jump" or "start" or "create" would be a much better choice.

When E I and O are the same

kw: observations, english language, phonics

Today for the first time I saw the name Jayson Werth in print. He is an outfielder for the Philadelphia Phillies, and drove in an insurance run by getting an eighth inning home run in the fifth playoff game with the Giants.

My interest today is with his surname rather than his athletic career. Until I saw it in the newspaper, I'd somehow had the idea that it was spelled Wirth. I didn't think of Worth because "real words" are less frequently used for English names. Taylor rather than Tailor, for example. Thankfully, a Smith is still a Smith (unless she's a Smythe).

Whether it is spelled Werth, Wirth or Worth, however, the pronunciation is exactly the same! In fact, if it were Wurth, it would still be pronounced the same!! English is not the only language that has inconsistent vowel phonetics, but it is definitely the worst. Items like this give my Japanese-born wife fits.

Three steps to English

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, english language

How often do you say or hear, "Long time, no see", or "Where to?", or even "Look-see"? All three have made their way into "common" English via Chinese-English Pidgin, an incipient Creole spoken by tens of thousands of traders and businesspeople throughout oceanic Asia, from the South China Sea through Indonesia and Malaysia. The crucial insight into how this Pidgin works is that the expressions use English words but Chinese and Malay grammar.

This kind of Pidgin arises when a more numerous people learn the words of the language of less numerous, but economically powerful, neighbors or invaders. A few expressions (e.g. kowtow, gung ho, typhoon) make their way in the other direction, but it is typically incumbent on the poorer people to learn how to speak to the more powerful.

A Pidgin is a second (or third or …) language for all parties involved. When large numbers of people begin to speak it as a first language, the result is called a Creole. Give it a few generations, with a bit of linguistic drift, and it becomes simply another language.

Another way a Creole can arise is among immigrants who learn a language as adults, including some of its grammar, and speak it "broken". When the number of immigrants is large, and when they in turn influence the language of the next generation for both their own children and those of the host country, large grammatical changes can occur. Depending on the extent of mongrelization of the languages, the result can be a Creole, or it may just cause the aggregation of lots of new terms and maybe a grammatical nicety or two from the immigrants' language into the host language. "Spanglish" is a Creole spoken in large areas of the U.S., particularly the Southwest states (more accurately, there are a few dialects of Spanglish already). But "Janglish" in Japan is, at this point, just a cute reference to the large number of English loan words the Japanese young people have picked up. "Franglish" is similar.

I found it fascinating, but altogether not surprising, that English has been Creolized at least twice, and its forbear language, Proto-Germanic, has had at least a strong influence from a Semitic language, possibly Phoenician. In Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, John McWhorter outlines his reasoning for this series of processes.

The author first demonstrates how Anglo-Saxon, brought to England in the Fifth Century A.D. by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, and which we tend to call Old English, morphed into Middle English over half a millennium or so. In the process, its Germanic grammatical constructions were nearly all replaced by a grammar that is seen to be Celtic, resembling Welsh and Cornish, including in particular our tendency to use "do" as a "helper verb": "Do you want to go?" or "I didn't take it!" have replaced "Want you to go?" and "I took it not!". The former are Celtic constructions, the latter, Old English but with modern spelling.

A second "Celtic marker" is our peculiar "-ing" present tense: "I'm running" for "I run". Every language uses "I run", except for English and—you got it—the Celtic languages. Thus Middle English has its roots in a Creole between Anglo-Saxon and Celtic tongues.

A second major shift occurred that was not driven by Celtic influences, and came later. Thousands of Vikings, many of them weary of raiding and hoping to take up farming in "fair Britannia", took over large portions of the island. The areas in which the largest numbers of them lived were the first to drop many of the case endings and verb declensions that we find in documents written elsewhere. "Broken" English became the norm. Thus while Anglo-Saxon had five or six noun cases, Middle English shifted rapidly from having four to having two (usually, add "s" to make a possessive), and from a larger number of verb tenses to only three: I sing, I sang, I have sung before. We handle the future by adding "will" or "going to".

Thus, among twelve Germanic languages in use today, only English has the "do" helper verb (which McWhorter calls "meaningless do"); only English uses present progressive with "-ing", and only English has shed nearly all inflections of nouns and much more than half the verbal apparatus. Oh, yeah: English also doesn't "sex" things like books and tables, as all other European languages do. This is why English speakers have a tougher time learning those languages. The extra frills that English has shed must be learned, and are very seldom learned with any perfection, while the Europeans are already familiar with them and just need to learn the words and the differences in how those frills work in a new language.

The other major difference between Old English and Middle English is the large number of French loan words that resulted from 150 years of Norman domination. The Norman elite were quite small in number, and their grammar didn't influence their English servants very much, but the words they required them to use made their way into English as a parallel vocabulary, which is why we have a larger number of synonyms than most languages.

But wait, there's more! The Proto-Germanic language that became Anglo-Saxon, reconstructed from a comparison of all the Germanic languages, was quite a bit different from proto-Indo-European. It actually had only about half the grammatical apparatus of its parent. It had already shed some of the cases and declensions. It also had about a third of its vocabulary derived from a non-Indo-European source. The author deduces that this source was a Semitic language, and he favors Phoenician, because they were the most avid seafaring people of the mid-First Millennium BC. It cannot yet be proven, but I agree with his reasoning, that Proto-Germanic began as a Creole, or as heavy loan-word borrowing from a Semitic language.

So, there you have it. Three mongrelizations that produced first the Germanic family of languages, including Old English, then Middle English, then Modern English. Based on this history, why is anyone concerned that English continues to change, not only its vocabulary, but its grammar also? Remember, "'Ain't' ain't a word, 'cause it ain't in the dictionary."? It is now. Remember the prohibitions against splitting infinitives, or against ending a sentence with a preposition? They were based on Latin grammar, and are no longer followed. What will change next? I don't know. Hang on for the ride!

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.