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WillowOne's Positions

The Etymologicon

Overview

Subtitled A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language, this is a chain of short chapters in which each word's origin leads to the next: how "testify" connects to testicles, how a bulldozer, a buffalo, and a Bible are related, why the Rolling Stones and gathering moss go together. Forsyth never pauses for long, and the book ends where it began. It grew out of his Inky Fool blog.

Notes

Pure pleasure, and a useful reminder that words are fossils of arguments: most of the terms in this vault ("sceptic", "atheist", "evidence", "apology") meant something different when they started and the drift is instructive. Forsyth also has the right attitude to etymology, which is that it tells you where a word has been and nothing about what it must now mean, a point that disposes of a surprising number of bad arguments.

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