Words in Time and Place

David Crystal is well known as the foremost scholar in language, and has produced yet another extraordinary book exploring the English language through the historical thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. This was first published in 2009 and includes 800,000 words with 235,000 entry categories. This book can provide a brief introduction to some of these words in the 15 chapters covering the history of words for dying, nose, being drunk, privy, fool, terms of endearment, oaths and exclamations, inns and hotels, prostitute, money, calm and stormy weather, old people, pop music and spacecraft. Each entry discusses influences on the emergence of words and occasionally divides them into categories, explaining each of them in chronological order with dates appended and information about whether the term is still in use. At the end of each chapter, there is a diagram explaining the topography of the word and its associations. Just taking the chapter on fools as an example, there are some really splendid words such as hoddypeak from 1500, bobolyne from 1540, dizzard from 1546, nodcock from 1577, gowk from 1605, nincompoop from 1673 (most people will know this one), berk from 1929, plonker from 1981 and wally from 1983. Anyone interested in words and their origins will derive a great deal of pleasure from perusing this book.