Bill Bryson "where words come from"

Where words come from by Bill Bryson, goes into great detail about words; the different types, how they are formed, or created; or made up. As he said "in Englsih, in short, there are words for almost everything". Starting at pages 67 he supports this by his many examples, just to name a few, there's a word for describing a sudden breaking off of thought: aposiopesis. If you harbor an urgeto look through the windows of the home you pass, also a word for this: crytoscopophilia, and so on. However I would have never thought that words for these actions even existed, however they are not familiar. On pages 68 he continues, that English has the richest vocabulary, for example one word can have several different meanings, all retaining to that word, such as house for home, forceful and forcible. No other langauge has so many words all saying the same thing. "Fine" for instance has forteen definitions as an adjective, six as a noun, and two as an adverb and it fills two pages in the oxford dictionary with 5,000 words of discription, ( fine art, fine gold, feeling fine, fine hair etc.). This condition of many meanings is called Polysemy. Furthermore on pages 71 according to Danis linguist Otto Desperson words are formed in one of four ways; by adding them, subtracting them, by making them up and by doing nothing to them. For example words created by error can be called Gost words, such as buttonhold and sweetheart. Also stated, words are formed by backformation, example pea originally pease as in the nursery rhymes. Laze from lazy, greed from greedy etc. For centuries words are adopted by taking them from other countries such as shampoo from India, ketchup from china, sofa from Arabia etc. Often, words are modified in the time it takes to reach us, having undergone various degress of filtering. Also changing meanings as they pass from one nation to another. Adding that this tendency to turn foreign sounds into native speech is common, example New York Flatbush was orginally Vlacht Bos. In the late middle ages the word dog was created, in english it was Hound or hund, however it was displaced. Further examples includes jaw, jam, bad, big, gloat,fun, grease etc. Many words are made up by writers, example shakespeare used 17, 677 words in his writings one tenth has never been used before. The new words of today represent an explosion of technology, pages 76 for example Lunar, module, and myocardial infarction.When a word stays the same but the meaning changes on pages 77, this is compared to as counterfiet once meant a legitimate copy. More than half of all words adopted into English from Latin now have meanings quite different from their original ones, for example Nice 400 years later becomes elegant, strange, unmanly, modest,precise etc. However somtimes an old meaning is preserved in a phrase or expression, like starve orginally to die, came to be to die of hunger. With adding the prefixes and suffixes: pre-, anti-, -ness, -able. English posseses the ability to make new wirds by fusing componds such as airport, seashore, footwear etc.