Book Review: New Words For Old by Caroline Taggart

Hardback by O’Mara Books, £9.99 (ebook £4.74)

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.

It’s a resourceful language. 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.