Liked this little book lots :-) Filled with trivia, strange words and their history. I don't think I'll forget that (in English) 40 ist the only number that has all its letters in alphabetical order. (Am I going to check it? No way!)

My favourite words:
dord - the proof that editors do miss the mark sometimes
gamp - a big umbrella
mogigraphia writer's cramp. Used to have that often when in university I tried to keep up in writing with the professor's speech
thank-you-ma'am - a bump or depression in road
and
gadzookery - use of archaic words or expressions

These are not all that surprized me, made me smile or even laugh out loud. They are just a handful that stood out. ( )

Brynn and Craig gave me this book for my birthday. (Props, peeps!)

You've really got to hand it to old Anu Garg: a non-English speaker (he's from India), he's authored three best-selling, English, books on the English language. Anyone who's ever learned a new language -- and enjoyed learning it -- can identify with Anu's enthusiasm and joy in re all aspects of English, his new language. This latest book, "Dord, Diglot, and Avocado" continues the fun. If nothing else, reading the book should get you to subscribe to Anu's website and daily email word prompt: www.wordsmith.org. Anu is something of a paronomasiciac, as am I, but I try to keep it in check. Anu, on the other hand, just revels in all manner of punning, anagramming, ambigramming, etc. (e.g., the phrase "my name is anu garg" anagrammatizes as "anagram genius"). Somehow, though, he never seems to cross the line into full-blown obnoxious. I can only admire that kind of equipoise.

The bonus of the book for me is that I learned a new adjective to apply to myself: diglot. I am a diglot -- and proud of it, too! ( )

This amusing little book groups its word histories into themes: eponyms, toponyms, charactonyms (with a whole chapter just for Dickens), words about food, words deliberately coined. This is a better method than alphabetical or by conversational happenstance.

Garg's origin of hazard (derives from an Arabic word for die, singular of dice) sounds plausible; of glamor, salary, travel and window I knew (so they continued to sound plausible) but his history of curfew I will have to double-check elsewhere (from French couvrir and feu, a call through town to cover (or bank or otherwise subdue) your fire so you wouldn���t torch the place through carelessness). Chortle, gerrymander and grok are old hat but I didn���t know scofflaw was similarly deliberately coined (during Prohibition, and meaning someone who flouts the 18th amendment).

I am delighted that clerihew was the name of someone who invented that form of comic verse: the word sounds so wordish, in contrast to the obvious name-iness of boycott, that I would never have guessed. What���s most interesting about that eponym is that it was the fellow���s middle name. Petrichor dates only to 1964, but it���s so perfect (and Greek) that I assumed it was as old as spartan or laconic. Garg credits a pair of Australians with it, and good: the smell after a rain is often delicious but those from an arid climate appreciate it the most.

I learned two words whose meanings I will find useful: accismus and velleity. The former means to feign lack of interest in something while actually desiring it, as with Aesop���s fox with the grapes; the latter is volition at its weakest, and Garg applies it to doing your taxes.

So I liked Garg���s organizational method, but it didn���t spare me his conversation. I allowed him to pun occasionally and allowed how ���Turin:to ruin��� didn���t sound forced. But after explaining laconic from Laconia, he wonders how they found their talk-show hosts. What a witticism. In the very next section, logically enough about Sparta, he credits Sparta���s spartanness on its lack of a television shopping channel. Gah. In the next, a pun using both a homograph and a homophone. Then he lays off for a while.

Every few pages is a wordish trivia question. Some were good: What is the only state whose name and capital share no letters? What is the only English word with three apostrophes? (South Dakota and Pierre, fo���c���s���le). Some were chestnuts: What word(s) begins and ends with ���und���? Does any word have three double letters? (underground and bookkeeper). But some were outright stupid: What word becomes shorter when you add two letters to it? What abbreviation has more syllables than the full form? (shorter and WWW)

Then there was nark. Garg asserts that nark and pince-nez each derive from the Indo-European root nas- , meaning nose. This I did not buy. Narc meaning stool pigeon is a clipping of narcotics agent, isn���t it? But my snark was ill-founded, because there is a British English word nark, distinct from Usan narc. Merriam-Webster isn���t as certain of its etymology as Garg is, but I had to smooth out my sneer and that I did not like. Oh well. I can still complain about the forcedly jocular tone.

This book is essentially a collection of etymological trivia, each chapter presenting a group of word origins on a common theme. For example, one is about words to do with food, another words named after fictional characters, another just about words derived from Dickens characters!  It's a decent little book, with some good information, and some forgettable stuff.  By far my favorite word origin was that of the titular dord, which meant "density"... just from 1934 to 1939.  Wikipedia has a pretty good explanation. (To my disappointment, I couldn't find anything in Google Books from the period where someone actually used dord.) Esquivalience also has a pretty good origin, too.

The book has its annoying tics. The footers all have "word puzzles" in them, with questions like "What words begin and end with the letters und?"  They're okay, mostly forgettable, but some got on my nerves.  Especially one where the question was merely "How are legislators like allegorists?"; the answer is that they're anagrams, a lame puzzle that tells you nothing clever about either word.  Even worse is the fact that "anagram" isn't defined until a puzzle that comes fifteen pages later!

The book feels like it comes from the 1990s sometimes, with a lot of Bill Gates jokes. And Garg is the only person I've ever heard claim that google has become a generic synonym for "to search"-- not Internet search, but as in the usage "I googled my keys." Has anyone ever really said that?  Also, he seems to think that the Romans, led by Julius Caesar, once declared war on Pompeii!

Those quibbles aside, this was a decent, light read.  I'm going to be trotting out that dord anecdote for years to come.

A delight ( )