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.