The Secret Life of Words

Henry Hitchings’ achieved that rarest of feats in 2008, winning the John Rhys Llewellyn Prize for a work of non-fiction: The Secret Life of Words. For any lover of the English language and its near-infinite richness the book is hard to beat. Meticulously conceived and executed, the book tracks English’s development as a language from its first stuttering Anglo-Saxon steps to its current incarnation as the world’s lingua franca. Through examining the foreign influence on the English language, Hitchings first illuminates the British national character. Then, by examining human beings’ relationship with language and the influence of technology on the world, it mutates into something all the more universal.

The author is an English lecturer at UCL and famously wrote a book about Samuel Johnson and his dictionary; on this showing it is not hyperbole to suggest that Hitchings shares something of the doctor’s love for scholarship and language. The breadth of the subjects and words covered boggles. Seemingly everything from Shakespeare to bukkake to Beowulf to Marco Materazzi is covered with great wit and verve.

To me, part of the book’s great attraction was the fact that each one of the chapters – manageable at around twenty pages – can be taken as a free-standing entity or as part of the narrative whole: namely the development of the English language. The chapters that I found most interesting were ‘Angst’, which examines twentieth-century preoccupations; ‘Blizzard’, which analyzes American English and the United States; and ‘Invade’, which details the Anglo-Saxon languages early struggles for assertion in Great Britain. Every anecdote is studded with a wry observation or humour and the Hitchings’ sheer joy is contagious.

One can hope to take more than a plethora of great facts (such as there are more words in the English language of Greek origin than there were words in Ancient Greek) away from this erudite-yet-accessible book. It certainly helped me to better understand British and European history, colonial or otherwise, as well as to better appreciate my mother tongue. A joyous celebration of a book; read it.