Cannonball #28: The Miracle of Language by Richard Lederer
by Caroline
This is a fun, fast little book about English and some of its requisite quirks. I liked the title when I spotted it at some thrift store or book sale, and Richard Lederer is a pretty famous wordplayer with a fair passel of cachet on these matters.
I was expecting more of a simple list-like book of examples of usage or something like that, but Lederer writes in essay form about some positive and negative attributes of the English language. He offers up many examples of the phenomena he describes and draws conclusions about, for instance, the way English accepts words from all other languages and absorbs them into common usage.
He makes some recommendations for writing, too, promoting both poetry and effective, simple language:
Here is a sound rule: Use small, old words where you can. If a long word says just what you want to say, do not fear to use it. But know that our tongue is rich in crisp, brisk, swift, short words. Make them the spine and the heart of what you speak and write. Short words are like fast friends. They will not let you down.
The part I liked best was when Lederer commented on which words derive from which languages — Anglo-Saxon terms are typically brief, French terms more gestural or figurative, and Latin or Greek terms more precise. Think about fear, terror, and trepidation, or ask, question, and interrogate.
Lederer devotes the last dozen or so pages of the book to a series of notable quotations about language and words, some from writers I’ve never heard of. My favorite of these is from Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle:
The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor.
Words are subject to trendiness and overuse the same as any fashion or food or occupation. To look at language both as a fresh, living organism and one of humankind’s most deeply rooted histories takes a big-picture view that we sometimes lose in an era when new (absurd) words crop up every day and more and more people fall out of love with high-quality writing and communication.
What we construct with words can feel new forever — Carlyle’s line still zings even from the 1800s, and even if Shakespeare’s language trips you up sometimes, his turns of phrase are often timeless.
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