On the Study of Words

Where words come from and what they carry: Trench takes ordinary English — knave, villain, pagan, sincere — and shows the history fossilised inside each one, and what it says about the people who made it. In 1857 he read a paper on the deficiencies of English dictionaries that set in motion the project which became the Oxford English Dictionary; he was Archbishop of Dublin, and these lectures are why the OED exists.