Six new books explore vagaries of English language

Published 9:50 am Friday, January 29, 2010

Here’s a look at six books that cut the mustard.

Uh … they cut the mustard? How many times have you said that? Maybe, oh, countless? Me too. Even so, while I regularly spread the mustard, I don’t actually cut the mustard.

I could cut mustard greens, but then I’d have to call this a piece about six books that cut the mustard greens. Nah.

Such are the vagaries of our language. Not only do we regularly use it and abuse it — and from those abuses, a living language continues to breathe and evolve — but we constantly say stuff we are unable to explain.

English, that greatest and most flamboyant of thieves, often leaves clear tracks that shift back through the centuries and directly to the tongues of the original owners.

Maybe the reason we still cut the mustard when we’re successful at something is because the sound of it tracks nicely.

“In America, to say something was ‘the proper mustard’ in the early 20th century meant it was the genuine article, and ‘cutting the mustard’ became a popular idiom to describe something that was up to scratch and more,” writes Susie Dent in “What Made the Crocodile Cry.”

Her fun book, from the folks who continue to print the remarkable Oxford English Dictionary, is about English eccentricities that we’ve turned into everyday language.

But what about that “up to scratch”? For the answer, I turned to another new release by Oxford, John Ayto’s “From the Horse’s Mouth,” the third edition of a dictionary of idioms. Ayto attributes the phrase to the sports world.

The scratch, he tells us, was the mark from which competitors began a race unless they’d been given an advantage and could start ahead of the mark. So a competitor starting from scratch (there’s another one!) began the competition without any advantage.

And up to scratch? “A competitor who was up to scratch was of a good enough standard to start a race,” Ayto writes.

His idiom book is an index long on definitions, with a nod to etymologies, but the phrase origins he cites are just plain interesting.

A third new Oxford release is called “The Insect That Stole Butter?” It’s a dictionary of word origins, and, abracadabra (first recorded in an A.D. 2 Latin poem), it cast a spell on me. Something as simple as learning that a cupboard was originally a single table for the display of cups sent me scrambling for other words that once had literal meanings.

Ralph Keyes points out in his new “I Love It When You Talk Retro” that “gung-ho” was the motto of a New Zealand group, taken from the Chinese words kung and ho: work and together. A colonel in the South Pacific adopted it for his Marine battalion, and a 1943 movie made that battalion’s story popular, and also the phrase.

Write about words, and people think you’re a walking encyclopedia of cool stories. Write about grammar and no matter what you say, someone will hate you. For guidance that explains grammar in a precise understandable fashion, Janis Bell’s “Clean, Well-Lighted Sentences” works just fine.

It’s a no-nonsense grammar, with quizzes after each chapter and solid examples. You’ll come out of it knowing all the basics of tense and case and even punctuation use.

If you already know all that, pick up the extraordinary “Woe Is I” by Patricia T. O’Conner, in its new third edition. O’Conner, a former editor at the New York Times Book Review, is among American English’s smartest grammarians, and her goal is to put common sense above anyone’s rules.

This seems a bold idea, but the more I read O’Conner, I realized that common sense has everything to do with the way we use English.

And she makes it so easy to be sensible. One chapter of “tombstones” is about all the dead rules we’ve long broken, but many people still insist on. (There, I just broke one.)

O’Conner speaks not for an anarchy, with a language so imprecise it’s meaningless, but for one that lives over time because people in general, and not just grammarians, make it work. I’m keeping this book by my keyboard.

McClatchy-Tribune Information Services

“Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English” by Patricia T. O’Conner ($22.95)

“Clean, Well-Lighted Sentences: A Guide to Avoiding the Most Common Errors in Grammar and Punctuation” by Janis Bell ($13.95)

“I Love It When You Talk Retro: Hoochie Coochie, Double Whammy, Drop a Dime, and the Forgotten Origins of American Speech” by Ralph Keyes ($25.95)

“From the Horse’s Mouth: Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms,” edited by John Ayto ($21.95)

“The Insect That Stole Butter? Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins,” edited by Julia Cresswell ($21.95)

“What Made the Crocodile Cry? 101 Questions About the English Language” by Susie Dent ($18.95)