Last year's Christmas will be remembered not only for the gift I gave my father but also for the accounting I'd done of the season, and of holidays and memories past. I can't make fanfare of every year — nor should I, I suppose. Let the essay stand for a few years before recollecting traditions new and old again.
For the last eight years or so I've felt that a Christmas without good reading wrapped under the tree is one that runs a bit short. Thankfully, my family has obliged; this year, too. Two gifts I inspired, in spite of my withholding of a list: not long before this season, I was struck from nowhere with the desire for books on the English language. Etymology, puzzles; anything rigorous and interesting would do. It's a topic I've enjoyed for years but about which I know I can always learn more. I told my mother, who, I learned Christmas morning, contacted her librarian friend, the mother of my childhood pal. My mother explained; her friend made a short search and offered her a list of titles. A trip was made to Borders to find and buy a magnificent book called The Adventure of English, a colorful narrative of the language from its Saxon-borne Frisian roots to modern speech and writing. Surviving invasion and cultural contention, the language has found strength in adaptability, appropriating liberally from languages to become even more diverse and resilient.
Ironically enough, that librarian friend, who emigrated decades ago from India, recently remarked to my mother that she and her friends think in Hindi. English, she reminded my mother, is a difficult language to learn. My mother and I both nodded. We'd both taken French in school, a language which, once its distribution of articles and accents is understood, is structurally logical and pleasantly unsurprising. English is very unpredictable, no rule holding fast, from spelling to pronunciation to vocabulary. Conformity can't be had by a patchwork quilt. Ironically, Henry V's drive to reestablish English as the country's language of authority required scribes of Westminster to permanently define standard spellings and grammar, resulting in some arbitrary choices of English roots for some words, French or Norse or other languages for others. So nearly halfway through Adventure, author Melvyn Bragg gives us a spirited defense of English from the schoolroom:
We'll begin with the box and the plural is boxes
But the plural of ox should be oxen not oxes.
Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese.
Yet the plural of a mouse should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a whole ot of mice.
But the plural of house is houses not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn't the plural of pen be called pen?
...The masculine pronouns are he, his and him
But imagine the feminine she, shis and shim!
So our English, I think you'll agree
Is the trickiest language you ever did see.
A language perfectly tailored to, as Bragg puts it, "winnow out the undereducated, stump children and fox foreigners." At least English believes in intimacy: either you know her or you don't.
The title of this post, by the way, is a succession of Latinate French, Latin and Old English; all likely a part of the language by the beginning of the 17th Century. The Adventure of English wins my recommendation.