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What: “The New Why Book of Golf,” by Bill Kroen

Publisher: Barnes & Noble ($8.95)

Ever wonder why golf is called golf? Why sand traps are called bunkers? Where the terms “bogey” and “birdie” come from?

These questions and hundreds more are answered in this marvelous little 118-page book. This revised edition of a 1993 book has sold so briskly since coming out late last year that a second printing is planned next month. Kroen is also the author of “The Golf Tip-a-Day Calendar,” “A Hacker No More,” “So, You Think You Know Golf” (trivia), and “Your Putter or Your Wife” (humor).

Kroen is a golf pro who is also a child psychotherapist for the public school system in Cambridge, Mass. He has a doctorate in education and has published more than 250 articles on parenting, child psychology, education--and golf. His background in psychology makes him a natural to write about golf.

The question-and-answer format for this book works well.

On why golf is so named, the answer, in part, reads, “The word ‘golf’ comes from the German word kolbe, which means club.

It is explained that “bunker” comes from the Scottish bonker, meaning a chest or box where coal is kept. “Bogey” comes from an imaginary Col. Bogey of the Great Yarmouth Club in England, and Maj. Charles Wellman would refer to failing to get par as “getting caught by the bogey man.” The book points out that, according to “Golf magazine’s Encyclopedia of Golf,” “birdie” was coined in the U.S. In 1903 an A.H. Smith of Atlantic City, N.J., is said to have remarked after holing out, “That’s a bird of a shot.”

There are more obscure questions too. On Page 112 is this one: “Why can’t a caddie hold an umbrella over the player while he putts?” And on Page 117: “Why can’t players tamp down spike marks on the green?”

Kroen seems to have thought of just about everything.