I just received a delightful little yellow book in the mail, Words of a Feather by Murray Suid. The subtitle is A Humorous Puzzlement of Etymological Pairs, and the premise is this: Suid presents 150 doublets, pairs of words that share a common ancestor, illuminating each doublet with a tiny essay. Some of the doublets you’ll find here are appendix and penthouse, cabbage and captain, jovial and Jupiter. In his preface, Suid admits that he “studied Latin once upon a time, but the main thing I remember is that I took it.”

(Okay, personally, this takes me right back to Ms. Turnbull’s Latin class at Julius T. Wright School for Girls, Mobile, Alabama, circa 1982–I remember there was a lot of talk about a puella and an aqueduct, but I can’t remember what the girl was doing in/on/around the aqueduct, and I remember something about the dative/accusative/ablative declensions, the first two of which sound like some relationships I’ve had, and the third of which sounds like a laxative. Also, now I can never hear the word aqueduct without thinking of John Berger’s beautiful novel Here Is Where We Meet, wherein the narrator meets his dead mother atop an aqueduct in Lisbon.)

So, far from having an academic feel, the book is accessible, even chatty, a charming desk companion for word freaks. In fact, the blurb on the front is from that most democratically accessible of contemporary poets, Billy Collins. In the entry for anecdote & antidote, Suid writes:

Anecdote goes back first to the Greek anekdotos,an-, “not,” plus ekdotos, “published.” Literally, “unpublished work.” This doesn’t look much like a donation until we split ekdotos into its parts: ek, “out,” plus didonai, “to give.” In other words, for the Greeks, publishing meant “giving out.” The word anekdotos was first used in a specific instance as the title of Procopius’s unpublished memoirs of Emperor Justinian I. Of course, like most secret memoirs, the book eventually was “given out,” and its juicy gossip ultimately gave anecdote its meaning of an entertaining and true story.