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Maybe someday
49
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
80/100Critics
17/100Scholars
Author:
Hana Videen
Publisher:
Princeton University Press
Date:
May 10, 2022
A collection of weird, wonderful, and downright baffling words from the origins of Englishâand what they reveal about the lives of the earliest English speakers.
What The Reviewers Say
... eminently giftable.
I doubt that I’m alone in frowning at the proliferation of nonfiction that began life as burblings on social media, and there’s an undelightful subgenre of Twitterature consisting of volumes that merely pile up linguistic trivia. But Ms. Videen is both a passionate medievalist and a relaxed, lucid writer; the pleasure she takes in her subject is infectious.
As it races through colourful examples, the book does also occasionally pause to make an interesting scholarly argument.
