Book review: New Words For Old - Recycling Our Language For The Modern World

OUR language had smoke and fog for a long time before we needed to combine them to describe “smog”.

And a “folder” only got its name because it’s made by folding a piece of card.

Caroline Taggart’s latest lexical offering — her previous books covered grammar, idioms and “words you should know” — looks at how English repurposes its existing components when up against new concepts and inventions.

Taggart arranges her etymological studies in loosely thematic chapters containing individual entries on words with a few paragraphs of explanation apiece.

With no overarching ideas wrapping it all up, it’s an unsatisfying read as a whole, but taken in bits you’ll feel like an instant linguistics expert.

And it is a hard book to resist dipping into, if only to find out how your household “budget” owes its name to a spat between politicians in the eighteenth century.

New Words For Old: Recycling Our Language For The Modern World

Caroline Taggart

O’Mara Books, £9.99;

ebook £4.74