There must be many instances when the telephone, the photocopier or the computer refuses to comply with your basic requests. There may be nothing wrong with them, but they either ignore you completely or take the wrong order. Those hassled by such hostile behaviour from machines would be glad to have a word for it, and there is. Resistentialism.

One might also like to know that there is a word called millihelen, a unit of beauty needed (at the rate of one soldier per unit) to motivate him to fight. Obviously, it is named after the Helen of ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’ vintage. Flipping through Anu Garg’s book, one comes across many such gems.

Garg is more a romancer of words than an etymologist. The founder of the wordsmith.org website and creator of the A.Word.A.Day email newsletter has, in this short volume, compiled a random list of words, along with accounts of how they came to mean what they came to mean. Almost every entry, which Garg very rightly christens the “hidden lives of words”, reads like a charming little story. Some come open-ended also, like good short stories, and find closure in the meaning of other words. This sort of exercise is not new, neither is the collection.

But what makes it delightful reading is Garg’s personal sense of belonging in each hidden life. For example, while discussing ‘urtext’, which means the earlier or original version of an established text/work, he cites Shakespeare peer Thomas Kyd’s ‘lost’ play being referred to as ‘ur-Hamlet’, and invites readers to form their own ur prefixed words, like ur-history. Then he wryly says that ‘urgent’ (ur+gent) is not actually an earlier prototype of Adam!

Some of the entries, like the category, ‘Ghost words’ are intriguing. These are words invented by publishers of dictionaries, either by accident or mischief. For example, the word ‘esquivalience’ was included in the second edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary. It was a complete entry with all the necessary paraphernalia. When the New Yorker investigated, it emerged that the editors did it as a sort of copyright trap — those who copied the entries will copy this too, and will be caught! It is pointless to present more examples of such teasing facts because there are many such in this book. Suffice it to say that if you gorgonise the Dionysian charm of Ruritanian Xanadu then you are not just Pecksniffian but also sprachgefuhl! Go read the book and figure it out.

The Dord, The Diglot And An Avocado Or Two | Anu Garg | Plume | 180pp