Writeology

Read: The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English, Henry Hitchings

I’ve been reading this book on and off for the better part of a year (it was a Christmas present along with Roy Blount’s Alphabet Juice) and I’ve at last finished it. Hitchings’s book traces the various influences of English over history, cataloging its borrowings from languages like German, French, Japanese, Arabic, and more. While at times it’s easy to get bogged down in his lengthy list of vocabulary, there are plenty of “a-ha” moments here when you come across a particular word. I especially enjoyed Hitchings’s last couple chapters, which deal with English’s more recent changes and project the kind of development the language is likely to undergo in the future, as non-native speakers outpace native speakers, and other languages such as Spanish and Chinese continue to impart their own influences.