Another Word A Day: An All-New Romp through Some of the Most Unusual and Intriguing Words in English

It's hard to write recommendations/reviews of grammar books. I mean, pretty much it can be summed up with, "Are you a word geek? If you are, you'll get something out of this. If you're not, you'll be bored to sobs." But I think even people who aren't especially enthusiastic about linguistics and the like might end up enjoying this one. Like the paragraph from the back of the book says, the definitions and etymologies are concise but also very informative. Sometmes when I read books similar to this one, I start to lose patience and skim a bit, but that wasn't the case here at all. Most pages have an interesting-but-unrelated-to-anything-in- particular quote at the bottom (the first page of each chapter doesn't) and it's full of questions, comments and stories behind words that wordsmith.org readers have contributed. Seriously, at one point there's even a short Sherlock Holmes fanfic. No kidding.

Anu Garg has been sending out his A Word a Day mailings to his linguaphilic subscriber base--some half a million strong at this point--for more than a decade. Another Word a Day is the second book to spring from this enterprise. (His A Word a Day was published in 2002.) In it Garg follows the format of his subscription list. The book is divided into 52 thematic chapters: calendar-related words (bissextile), words that are apparent misspellings of other words (monestrous), words about words (hyperbole), and so on. Garg discusses five words per chapter, providing for each its pronunciation, syntax, etymology, definition, and an example, usually culled from some modern source, of the word in print. (For example, for the word cruciverbalist Garg uses a passage from Booklist discussing Parnell Hall's series of crossword mysteries.) A quote from some famous person appears at the bottom of most pages of the book--though these quotes aren't relevant to the words under discussion in the text. Each chapter also includes a number of responses from readers of Garg's mailings. These are set off in boxes, which serves to break up what would otherwise be a monotonous layout. They are also sometimes rather interesting--for example, the seventeen different explanations Garg's readers offered for the origin of the term eighty-six as a verb meaning "to throw out." And a Seattle reader draws a nice parallel between hapax legomena (words with only one recorded use) and Googlewhacking:

Hapax Legooglemenon
"A recent variant on finding singularity in a large corpus, namely the sport, pastime, and occasional obsession of Googlewhacking. You challenge the awesome indexing capabilities of Google.com to find that elusive query (two words--no quotation marks) with a single, solitary result!"
-- Mike Pope, Seattle, Washington

You'll be happy to become acquainted with some of the words and etymologies in Garg's corpus--dasypygal means "having hairy buttocks"; "helpmeet" comes from an erroneous interpretation of a Biblical passage. Some of the entries are less compelling. I most enjoyed the more conversational parts of the book, the reader responses already mentioned and the brief discussions with which Garg introduces each chapter. I would have enjoyed the book as a whole more if the entries included lengthier discussions--more on a word's history in popular culture, perhaps, memorable anecdotes attached to the words, however tangentially--but I realize that that is not the format Garg follows in his mailings.

Linguaphiles will enjoy Another Word a Day, but reading it straight through is not recommended except to the most voracious verbivore: this is more of a book you'll want to nibble on from time to time.

Debra Hamel [...]

"Another Word A Day: An All-New Romp through Some of the Most Unusual and Intriguing Words in English" has 18 words in its title. None of them are as amazing as the ones listed inside.

Author Anu Garg may have memorized that most wonderful dictionary of dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary. However, the OED is a massive collection of books that requires a magnifying glass and an entire wall in a home office to store it. Garg's book is far less intimidating to the verbal neophyte, and easier to toss into a backpack.

Each day, you could read a new word to add to your mighty vocabularic coffers, ready to swing out in conversation. Garg designed this thing topically, with each chapter representing a week, with five words per chapter. Garg, like myself, believes that even great minds need to take the weekend off.

He provides some background for each word, with some popular culture references. This helps see it all in context.

What kinds of things will you learn? Besides a few French and Arabic words that found their way into English, you have some 50 other topics, from "What's in a Name?" to "What does that Company Name Mean?" No, Enron is not listed with a corresponding definition, but lucent, cingular, prudential, suppurate and vanguard are defined.

The words are far more user-friendly than to be considered "most unusual" as described in the title. Most of these are words with some degree of common usage. Well-read people will have seen most of them before, although there were a few I thought might only be used in Scrabble (cadogan, imprest, assize, ambsace). This might be only indicative of my shortfalls.

Where the book misses its mark is that there is no enough meat for each word. While the brevity of definitions the words keeps the reader from confusion, it would be nice to have more quotes using the word. If I would read a word a day, I would like to have read enough, with correlating quotes and history, to use the word adeptly.

Overall, I enjoyed "Another Word A Day." It reads easily; I read more than a word a day, and finished the book in one morning. Expect to smile at a few unexpected definitions, learn a few words, and know more about words we use daily.

I fully recommend "Another Word A Day" by Anu Garg.

Anthony Trendl
editor, HungarianBookstore.com

In "Another Word a Day" (is anyone else irritated that we cannot use italics for titles on reviews here?) Anu Garg devotes 52 specialized chapters to sets of five words each. He focuses on a common theme for each chapter, such as Numeric Terms, Fishy Words, or Words about Books and Writing (and having deployed the quotations for the book title, I must leave the chapter titles unadorned).

I received a copy of this book back in the winter and promptly lost it when it slid behind a rather ugsome desk I was in the process of tidying. Now that I have ousted the book, I am enjoying it. More to the point, I'm learning a great deal about a diverse, interesting collection of words. Mr. Garg succeeds in large measure by making the process entertaining. I suspect that the most ardent agelast would at least chuckle to himself at some point and that even erudite readers will run across words they had either forgotten about or hitherto not encountered.

Mr. Garg offers definitions parsed out by parts of speech, delves into a bit of etymology without lapsing into morbidly detailed fact-finding, and includes examples of how each word has been used in the current lexicon. He augments the text with an abundance of quotes and pithy sidebars.

In short, a book that provides nutriment in spades for those folks, myself included, who are interested in words and their usage and history.

"Another Word A Day" is even more enjoyable than author Garg's first book (Word a Day.) This continuing romp through the riches of English includes 17 stories about how the restaurant term "86" came about. Most of the stories are ridiculous, but one seems to ring true to me (the source being a teletype code used by journalists.)

The section on the word "alembic" is fascinating, with a tale about distilling cider in rural Brittany.

There is so much more in "Another Word a Day." I recommend this for families. Reading a page of this (with suitable bowdlerization done by Mummy or Daddy) would make a great dinner table ritual. My dad gave us science stories over the dinner table and they were memorable. This book can serve as family entertainment or just as a relaxing book to pick up and wander through. Recommended.