Noncompositional

On a recent trip to Barnes and Noble (I have a gift card) I happened upon a book in one of the bargain sections called (IIRC) Where’s that word from? I looked inside the front jacket and saw what I expected, namely things like “did you know [word x] actually came from the Old [English/Norse/etc] word [blah] that means [amusing thing]? Find out all about this and many other words in this collection of…” I figured that it would be a series of one- or two-page-long descriptions of maybe a hundred words, with some light commentary and anecdotes, or whatever. So I turned to a random page in the middle, and was slightly surprised to find that a more appropriate description of the book would have been English Etymological Dictionary, because that’s what it was: a list of words with a short definition (the sort helpful only to an already-literate user of English) and a line about the proximal source language (Middle French, Latin, etc.) and word. Then I looked at the front matter, and found a description of the history of the English language, not surprisingly. Only the author talked about “Indo-Germanic (or Indo-European).” Then I turned to the publication information: yep, 1974. And probably the really original publication date was rather earlier. Sweet repackaging, guys.

At the moment I’m trying to recover the exact publication information, including the editor and original title, but for some reason I can’t find it out. Might be another trip to B&N for me.