Books by Owen Barfield
“He’s partly an etymological scholar, but he also has a very sympathetic imagination. He explores the ways in which the histories of particular words can reveal changes in the ways that humans experience the world. Flowing all the way through the book is a very grand vision of the evolution of consciousness. It’s not a long book but in some ways it’s quite daunting because it’s so erudite. It would now, I’m sure, be dismissed for not having scholarly rigour but it actually does have that, as well as a very idiosyncratic approach. He looks at particular words—electric, garden and quality, say. He looks at how the meanings of those words have changed and what that says about the past.” Read more...
Henry Hitchings, Linguist
Interviews where books by Owen Barfield were recommended
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1
History in English Words
by Owen Barfield -
2
The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language
by Mark Forsyth -
3
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
by Oxford University Press -
4
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
by Simon Winchester -
5
The F-Word
by Jesse Sheidlower -
6
Slang To-day and Yesterday
by Eric Partridge
The Best Books on Etymology
The Best Books on Etymology
Are you an autodidactic maven of sesquipedalian verbosity? Do you venerate periphrasis, or simply revel in linguistic disquisition? If so, you might enjoy our selection of books on etymology, as recommended over the years by our expert interviewees.
The best books on Language, recommended by Henry Hitchings
The wordsmith and cultural historian debunks common myths about English, recommends the smartest writing about words, and says apostrophes are “orthographic squiggles” not worth fighting for.
