It’s only words

As the subtitle states, this is a book about the hidden lives and strange origins of common and not-so-common words.

The Dord, The Diglot, and an Avocado

Everybody knows the resident word nut. He’s either spotting your split infinitives or making a point about how ‘hoi polloi’ doesn’t need to be ‘the hoi polloi’.

HT Image

So why don’t you shut him up for a while by buying him a copy of Anu Garg’s The Dord, The Diglot, and an Avocado or Two (Plume, Rs 225).

As the subtitle states, this is a book about the “hidden lives and strange origins of common and not-so-common words”.

Garg, the creator of the website, A.Word.A.Day, (http://wordsmith.org/awad) has chapters like ‘Tasty Words’ (Deipnosophist: a good conversationalist at meals), ‘Fictional Characters Who Come Alive’ (Throttlebottom: a purposeless incompetent in public office, from the first Pulitzer-winning musical comedy, Of Thee I Sing), and ‘Ultimately We Are All Related’ (‘Hibernation’ is derived from the Indo-European root ghei (winter) from which the name ‘Himalaya’ also comes from through the Sanskrit ‘him’ (snow), which in turn comes from ‘hiemal’ (related to winter)).