The Secret Life of the English Language, By Martin H Manser

Since most readers of this book will be practitioners of its subject matter, they may feel the urge to chip in their twopenn'orth to this tasty gallimaufry of linguistic oddities.

We may note that its list of words with silent letters contains handkerchief and fjord but lacks depot and debris, while a page of common misspellings contains desiccate and supersede but lacks miniature and decrepit. Similarly, its offering of famous animal names includes Humphrey, the cat banished by Cherie from No.10, and Hodge, Dr Johnson's "very fine cat indeed", but not Socks, the Clinton family's celebrated feline.

The collection of famous slogans omits "Afore ye go" (Bell's whisky) and "For your throat's sake" (Craven A cigarettes). Possibly for reasons of politeness, Berkshire Hunt (innocuous when contracted to "berk") is missing from the examples of rhyming slang.

Most entries, however, contain more enlightenment than omissions. You might have known that chortle was coined by Lewis Carroll and quark by James Joyce, but do you know that nerd comes from Dr Seuss? A list of envelope acronyms, which surely strays into jokey apocrypha with CHIP (come home, I'm pregnant), will be mystifying to the digital generation, but oldsters will be equally at sea with "emoticons", the use of keyboard symbols for abbreviated messages. If you ever receive :=) it means that you are a little Hitler.

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