An Eccentric Study of Words and Their Quirky Origins

The very existence of words is a mystery verging on absurdity. Why should a given combination of voiced sounds stand for an object, an activity, an idea or a quality? While linguists focus their attention on the underlying structure of language in general, poets, etymologists and other word-lovers cherish the strangeness and uniqueness of individual words. For every word has a history of its own, a palimpsest of meandering meanings. “Silly” once meant innocent and simple, and may have derived from a German word meaning “blessed.” In “manufacture” we find the act of making something by hand, though most of what we now think of as manufactured is made by machine. The rhythm that is “cadence,” the erosion that is “decadence” and the happenstance that is “occasion” all contain a history of a fall (the Latin word cadere).

The author of 18 novels and 10 works of nonfiction, the British-born, American-based writer Paul West offers an appropriately idiosyncratic meditation on the building blocks of his trade. Taking the form of a biographical dictionary of selected vocables, “The Secret Lives of Words” invites us to look at words not merely as a means to an end, but as objects of value in and of themselves: “[T]hose who know only what words are for,” declares West, “can hardly know what words are.” He wonders what it would be like “if all speakers and writers used words with an acute and chronic sense of everything the words had been, so that, with each word there came an umbra and a penumbra. . . . Swimming in the top layer of language is good enough . . . but swimming there with some inkling of what’s below puts all we say and write in a colossal context.”

The words whose lives West has chosen to examine here are a motley crew, ranging from venerable ones like “abacus” and “amethyst” to modern coinages like “wuss” and “autoresponder.” West has a fondness for terms connected with what our ancestors euphemistically called “bodily functions.” We learn, for instance, that “bidet” was originally French for a “little horse,” something one straddles. Some of his etymologies seem, as he himself warns, dubious.

And in some cases, West fails to give one, offering instead brief essays on subjects like “cricket,” a game he considers to be “incessantly slandered by those who have never played . . . it.” (Fair enough perhaps, but why, we are still left wondering, is it called “cricket”?) Nor does accuracy seem to have been West’s primary concern: He tells us the term “genocide” was “coined by the Polish-American jurist Raphael Lemkin in 1944 at the Nuremberg trials” even though the trials began, of course, only after the war in 1945.

But, although “The Secret Lives of Words” may not make it as a trusty reference book, it provides much stimulating diversion and food for thought. Who would have imagined that “sad” once meant “full” or “tired of” (as in “saturated” or “sated”), then came to mean “steadfast” and, later, “valiant,” “trustworthy,” “intelligent” and “care-laden”? Or that West’s mother used to bake what she called “sad” chocolate cake, a damp, unrisen, heavy treat that pleased young Paul because it was more like icing than cake!

An entry on “gerund” (from the Latin gerere, to carry or to bear) sparks a digression on the Roman character: “The Romans liked to group associated thoughts together in one uninterrupted word, which tells you something about their reverence for the unit as distinct from a dozen fluttering small particles.”