Backpocket Words
Backpocket Words: Sharing the Essence of English Spelling
by Gail Portnuff Venable
A charming wander through the etymological connections between words
This is simply a lovely book! It works well as a companion to Beneath the Surface of Words (reviewed here) because while that book gives you the ‘science’ behind the spellings, Backpocket Words revels in the pleasure of investigating individual words to figure out their peculiarities.
An extract from Backpocket Words, including a morphological matrix for the base <hilar>.
What it’s about
Gail Portnuff Venable delves into the etymology of individual words, explaining the mysteries of English spelling and the unexpected relationships between words. She also makes excellent use of word sums and morphological matrices to show the structure of words and highlight the links between them. If you weren’t convinced about using matrices with your students, this book shows how useful they are (see the photo for an example)!
Best bit
One of my favourite word-explorations is pandemonium, which is revealed to be coined by Milton from pan- “all”, demon (creature from hell) plus the Latin suffix -ium. What a fitting origin for a word that describes ‘all hell breaking loose’! And, of course, an excellent way to remember the spelling.
The takeaway
I’d recommend this for people who simply enjoy exploring words – it’s very informative as well as enjoyable. However, it you’re after a textbook-style introduction to spelling, this isn’t it, and you may get a bit annoyed at the idiosyncratic approach.