History in English Words by Owen Barfield, 218 pages
A living language is not something manufactured, it is grown gradually over the course of centuries, with layer upon layer of accretion. By digging back into those linguistic strata of the past, Barfield tells us, we can recover some sense of how the people of previous ages lived and thought. Likewise, this linguistic archaeology can reveal the full significance of the words we use today.
History in English Words is nothing more or less than a journey through The Oxford English Dictionary with a particularly erudite guide. Doubtless, more recent scholarship has invalidated some of Barfield's work, first published in 1926, but the main structure has enough redundant supports that losing a few here or there barely constitute a weakening of the whole.
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