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. Fifty-eight plates from Rembrandt to Thomas Eakins trace the quiet dignity of ordinary people at work and at rest, the same dignity Trench finds buried in everyday speech.