One for the Christmas stocking

Wordy things have had a renaissance of late. Stephen Fry’s superb five-part BBC series, Fry’s Planet Word, aired recently; David Crystal has just produced a handsome new volume, The Story of English in 100 Words; and now Mark Forsyth, of Inky Fool blog fame, offers up the charmingly titled The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language.
 
As such a quirky handle suggests, the book is a collection of verbal curiosities. Forsyth investigates what he calls the “glorious insanities of the English language” by exploring the etymological roots of words. The results are fascinating. Take the rich dialect of drink: we learn how our adjective ‘groggy’ comes from ‘grog’, the nickname for watered-down rum; the man who originally ordered the rum to be watered down, Admiral Vernon, was nicknamed the ‘Old Grog’ because, suitably enough, he wore a sturdy coat made from grogram. And thus a feeling is born. Or how about the various etymological cousins of the word ‘champagne’: the word stems from ‘wine from the countryside’ (the French ‘vin de campagne’); ‘campagne’ comes from the Latin ‘campus’ from which we also get ‘champion’, ‘camp’, and ‘scampering’ — all, in a roundabout way, connected to a bottle of fizz.
 
This dextrous approach to the history of words allows Forsyth to prod his nose into all sorts of areas. One of the most enjoyable is the way he calls on famous writers as alibis for meaning. We get quotes from Laurence Sterne and Shakespeare on early uses of the word ‘bohemia’ (“our ship has touched / Upon the deserts of Bohemia?” from The Tempest). William Blake and William Morris both merit a mention in the history of the word ‘worm’ (apparently ‘worm’ used to mean ‘dragon’, making more sense of William Morris’s line “Therewith began a fearful battle twixt worm and man”). In Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë popularized the use of ‘gormless’, all but single-handedly retiring the once-current parent word ‘gorm’. Balzac demonstrates the penetration of the word ‘coffee’ into Western consciousness, while Thomas Wyatt, Erasmus and Mick Jagger all have a hat-tip in the etymology of the phrase ‘rolling stone’ (once, as it happens, a gardening term).
 
Another charming aspect of the book is coming across words long since forgotten. The section on dictionaries is a particular treat in this respect. From the forbiddingly titled Abecedarium Anglico Latinum (1552) comes the word ‘wamblecropt’ (meaning ‘afflicted with queasiness’); or from Table Alphebetical (1604) we have ‘concruciate’ (‘to torment or vex’), ‘deambulation’ (‘a walking abroade’), ‘querimonious’ (‘full of complaining and lamentation’) or the delightful ‘spongeous’ (‘like a sponge’). And let us not forget the handy tonsuring term ‘acersecomicke’, meaning ‘one whose haire was never cut’ from Henry Cockeram’s The English Dictionarie (1623). All enough to make you feel very wamblecropt indeed.
 
The snappy section lengths and the perky writing style, plus the comely jacket-less cover, makes this prime fare for the Christmas market. You can read it through at a sitting or two, or dip in as fancy takes. A perfect bit of stocking-filler for the bookish member of the family, or just a cracking all-year-round read. Highly recommended.