I dropped
The Rains Came for its incredibly nasty racist/imperialist imagery - the author fixated on describing Indians of various castes as different animals!
BUT, 4.75/5 at the Storygraph for
Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English by Philip Durkin. NOT popsci this was all sci and no pop, full of careful academic caveats and qualifiers, but still a riveting read. Three standouts for me
(1) "elephants were hardly central to Anglo-Saxon society" - a delightfully droll understatement when exxamining that particular loanword's origins.
(2) Learning that
Quote:
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Old English has distinct words for ‘father’s brother’ (fædera) and ‘mother’s brother’ (ēam), and for ‘father’s sister’ (fēu) and ‘mother’s sister’ (mōdriġe)
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The Hindi equivalents are so VERY useful that I say we need to revive these truly English originals asap.
(3) Seeing an amusing academic smackdown - a whole page in which Durkin mildly and politely
shreds Sir Walter Scott with a strong hint the writer of Ivanhoe should have stuck to his knitting.
