This is a collection of short notes on various words: ``I started to note the beauty of image and of sound in words that caught my eye and ear. But, after that, the oddity and the humour of our vocabulary also demanded their record. That led to investigation of meanings and origins...''. Brown wrote a series of shorter books, now long out of print, of which this is a subset.

The words range from the everyday to the archaic or entirely obscure (hapactic?), with a broad detour through British dialect. The notes, supported by frequent quotations, touch on etymology, meaning, construction, and history; but there is a particular emphasis on phonesthemic connotation and poetic usage. Brown regrets that the handsome word "carapace" is allocated to the description of turtles' anatomy. (His humor, by the way, wavers between the dry and the pointlessly polysyllabic, a situation to which I can relate.)

eub 8/96