World of Words: The Personalities of Language

Readers of Gary Jennings’s best-selling novels Aztec and The Journeyer know that he delights in language–in its history, in word origins, and in the relationship between language and culture. Jennings’s delight is solidly based on scholarship, and this book–a revised and updated edition of his 1965 Personalities of Language–is a stylish and fascinating Baedecker to the world of words, the idiosyncrasies and eccentricities of language from caveman to adman, from hieroglyph to acronym.