The Secret Life of Words

The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English by Henry Hitchings

346 pages

Started: 27 July 2011
Finished: 27 August 2011

At the end of the book the author says this:

Language is always changing. No living language can stand still; rather, each moves in a current of its own making. It is this vitality that ensures language is so sustaining a subject. As long as there are groups on the move, languages will change. (p. 342)

This book is the story of how the English language moved out into the world and what it brought back with it from its travels.  Through invasion, conquests, trade, media, technology, and many other routes, English has been constantly absorbing its surroundings. In telling the story of the history of the English language the author also tells the story of the English people.

I remember learning different folk dances in my dance for elementary teachers class at BYU and partially wishing that I had a more interesting heritage than British. The British folk dance we learned was the slow steps of Greensleeves. Rather boring when compared with the exciting rhythms and movements of the other folk dances we learned. Reading this book however, made me really get into my British heritage, and makes me wish I’d made Brett list me as Anglo-American on the census last year.

This book is extremely well written. You can tell as you read through it that each word was chosen with care to convey not just the straight up meaning of the word, but the history and feeling that the word evokes as well. The words are chosen very deliberately and it is not mere coincidence that one word is chosen over another. Each chapter is titled with a word that expresses, not just in meaning, but in history, the portion of history that will be covered in that chapter.

Many words talked about in the book don’t strike me as English at all, but rather as foreign words we use to express a foreign thought. The word still belongs to the foreign language. But other words we have absorbed so completely that there is no doubt in my mind that they are English words, though they hardly started that way. English has pulled from nearly every corner of the globe.

Another interesting bit for me was to see how the same word has had different meanings over the course of the history of English language. To read a book written decades or centuries ago and fully understand it you would have to know what the words meant at the time it was written, and not what they have come to mean today.

Brett read this same book before I did. And it reminded me again of why I prefer physical books. As I was reading through it there were passages that he had marked that he thought were significant. If he were to go back through it again he’d find a few passages that I have marked as well. Through the medium of the book we’ve had a conversation about it. A few of those passages are:

The limits of our language mark the limits of our world. (p. 11)

To claim and modify Indian words was to anglicize not just the words themselves, but the things for which they stood. (p. 237)

Language … has a dual character: it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture. (p. 301)

At its most extreme, political correctness is capable of destroying family life and rewriting history. (p. 330)

Rating: 10

Alphabet of Books – W