In today's bonus just for Grammarpaloozians, we look at book recommendations from our guests Jess Zafarris and Danny Hieber. They shared books about etymology, the history of English, a new collection of linguistic facts, and a novel.
In today's bonus just for Grammarpaloozians, we look at book recommendations from our guests Jess Zafarris and Danny Hieber. They shared books about etymology, the history of English, a new collection of linguistic facts, and a novel.
Find Jess Zafarris at UselessEtymology.com, or find her podcast Words Unravelled on YouTube.
Find Danny Hieber at LingusiticDiscovery.com or on his Substack.
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: This ad free podcast is part of your Grammarpalooza subscription.
Greetings, Grammarpaloozians. Happy word-of-the-year season. We just finished talking about the 2025 words of the year with Jess Zafarris from Words Unraveled and Danny Hieber from Linguistic Discovery. And now I'm so excited to bring you their book recommendations. Jess and Danny, welcome to the bonus segment.
Jess Zafarris: Thanks for having us on the show.
Danny Hieber: Yeah, it's great to be on.
Mignon Fogarty: So who wants to go first with some books?
Danny Hieber: I have one. It's a really good one. It just came out last year. You might have heard of it. It's called “Useless Etymology” by Jess Zafarris. No, but seriously, that book is now the book that I recommend to people who are interested in etymology. I used to recommend “Etymologicon,” which is a great book too.
But I really like, Jess, how you open the book and explain why etymology actually isn't useless. Like, I love that you kind of had to do this sort of retro introspection on it. And yeah, you just give a lot of good themes to it, so it really is, it's become one of my top recs now. I love it.
Jess Zafarris: Thank you so much. I'm giving a talk in that vein about the utility of etymology at South by Southwest next year, and I'm really looking forward to it.
Mignon Fogarty: Nice. And I know, you know, it's book-buying season for sure for the holidays. So, Jess, do you maybe have a book or two that might make a good gift for someone?
Jess Zafarris: Well, this one might be—
Mignon Fogarty: Would make, I'm sorry. Yours would make a good gift too.
Danny Hieber: Yes.
Jess Zafarris: Oh, you know, the one that I would recommend, and you know what? This one might be a pre-order right now in the U.S. but it's coming out in the U.K. soon. It's “Crystal's Curiosity Cabinet.” Linguist David Crystal has a book coming out with just a collection of delightful nonsense, and I highly recommend it. It's easy to access, but it's also one you can flip through. It makes a nice coffee table book, beautifully designed. It has literature. It's got some fun linguistic nonsense, like we've all talked about collectives and things like that before. So it does that sort of thing. But then it also talks about like Dickens' voice portraits and interesting elements from Joseph Heller's “Catch-22,” yielding the like catch-22 situation that we use in common parlance now.
Mignon Fogarty: And speaking of someone who's prolific, I think he has 80, a hundred books, and he has so many books.
Danny Hieber: It's wild. One of his other books is the book that I recommend for anyone interested in the history of English, and it's called “The Stories of English.” And what I love about it, and a lot of other linguists have pointed this out too, is that there's kind of a standard narrative about the history of English you're supposed to talk about. You know, the Old English period and then the Norman Conquest and Middle English, and you talk about Chaucer, and then you get to Early Modern English and Shakespeare. And this is this very linear story. And so he deliberately calls it “The Stories of English” because he's trying to show that English has always been this extremely dialectically diverse language. It has never been this uniform thing, and so it really gives you this great appreciation for the fact that variation's always been there. We get very upset about variation and dialects and people speaking differently, but it's just a normal part of language. So it's just a great book. Highly recommend.
Jess Zafarris: That's wonderful.
Mignon Fogarty: Nice. Do either of you have any novels that you would recommend?
Jess Zafarris: Oh, I came across a wonderful novel this year. This, I don't know that this is particularly for word nerds, but if you just enjoy reading, I really enjoyed “The Shadow Glass” by Josh Winning. I believe that was his debut, and it's, imagine if The Muppets and Labyrinth combined and came to life. It's very fun.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, that's great. Well, thank you both so much for sharing your recommendations, for being here, for talking about the Word of the Year. Jess and Danny, why don't you tell people where they can find you?
Jess Zafarris: You can find me on YouTube at Words Unraveled, where I host a podcast about etymology with my friend Rob Watts, and you can also find me on TikTok at Jess Zafarris and in bookstores.
Mignon Fogarty: Nice, and Danny.
Danny Hieber: You can find me on Linguistic Discovery on pretty much any social media channel. I do short-form videos, long-form YouTube videos occasionally, and this year I'll be really leaning in more to a newsletter, so you can find that on Substack or linguisticdiscovery.com.
Mignon Fogarty: Wonderful. Thanks both so much for being here.
Jess Zafarris: Thanks for having us.