As the world's most hospitable language, English has welcomed words from at least 350 other tongues. English has stood accused of promiscuity because its loose grammar embraces vocabulary of all sorts. Others call it the language of imperialism for swallowing the world through political and cultural conquest.
Whatever English is, its etymology and evolution is fascinating for any lover of words. A pair of recent books examines the world's lingua franca from different perspectives. In Alphabet Juice (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Roy Blount Jr. offers a cheeky but informative stroll through the language from A to Z. Henry Hitchings' The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is a more recondite examination of its development, especially how it borrowed from every continent save Antarctica as British adventurers, traders and colonists explored and subdued much of the Earth.
The differences come down to the personalities of the authors. The prolific Blount is an American humorist with many interests, an heir to Twain and Mencken. Hitchings is a drolly humorous and erudite Englishman descended from Dr. Johnson.
If Blount has a theme, it's his dislike of professional linguists who insist that the relationship between words and their meaning is entirely arbitrary. Since many academic linguists couldn't write a persuasive sentence under threat of a pistol-whipping, Blount has all the advantages as he dismantles their pedagogy. He asserts that words in every language began as imitations of the way things sound, albeit he cautions, "Science naturally abhors what it can't universalize." He isn't making a dogma, just a generality.
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On another level, Alphabet Juice is a critique of contemporary society, as when Blount posits that "absolutely" is "heard more and more often in conversation as truth gets more and more relative." And don't get him started on the misuse of "awesome," a word that has been absolutely stripped of awe.
Hitchings' theme is English's spongelike absorbency and adaptability. American English has been especially open, borrowing new terms from Spanish settlers of the Southwest and the French of Quebec, from American Indians and many immigrant cultures. Strangely, American English is also more archaic than its British parent, preserving medieval locutions long forgotten on the island kingdom. Open Hitchings to almost any page and something interesting will pop up. Knowing that "mortgage" is Latin for "death grip" gives our economic downturn a deeper meaning.
