This ended up being the equivalent of a non-fiction beach read. It had some wonderful nuggets, one being the delightful relationship between the words testify/testimony and testicles, all derived from the Latin word for witness. (Apparently, when swearing an oath, it was common practice among ancient Romans to clutch their own or their monarchs's testicles.) Another was changing the name of an ugly unpopular fish from Patagonian toothfish to Chilean sea bass, and taking the slime head and renaming it the orange roughy. In both cases, sales took off.
There were times, though, when I wished the author had dug deeper. He mentions that pig-eating English speakers call the animal's flesh pork, but doesn't explore the reason for our language's interesting division between the animal and the meat: pig/pork; cow/beef; sheep/mutton, dating from a time when England had French-speaking royalty who ate the meat, while Saxon-speaking peasants raised the animals. I sometimes wished he would spend several pages on an interesting tidbit, rather than hopping from fact to interesting fact.
The last few pages on the euphemizing instinct were fascinating, and could have been a whole book. They touched on the difference between swearing as an interjection and all other language. People who have lost all other language function still sometimes use expletives. The author posits that cursing may be a type of proto-language. It's possible that language and the use of euphemisms are closely connected with the growth of complex thought.
There were times, though, when I wished the author had dug deeper. He mentions that pig-eating English speakers call the animal's flesh pork, but doesn't explore the reason for our language's interesting division between the animal and the meat: pig/pork; cow/beef; sheep/mutton, dating from a time when England had French-speaking royalty who ate the meat, while Saxon-speaking peasants raised the animals. I sometimes wished he would spend several pages on an interesting tidbit, rather than hopping from fact to interesting fact.
The last few pages on the euphemizing instinct were fascinating, and could have been a whole book. They touched on the difference between swearing as an interjection and all other language. People who have lost all other language function still sometimes use expletives. The author posits that cursing may be a type of proto-language. It's possible that language and the use of euphemisms are closely connected with the growth of complex thought.
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