Word Drops: A Sprinkling of Linguistic Curiosities

If you’re logofascinated, you are literally spellbound by language. Word Drops is a language fact book unlike any other, its linguistic tidbits all falling together into one long interconnected chain just with each fact neatly ‘dropping’ into place beside the next.

What’s more, throughout, footnotes are used to give informative and intriguing background to some of the most bizarre facts, covering everything from traditional Inuit games to the origin of the Bellini cocktail, from the precise length of one ‘jiffy’ to what the Romans thought hoopoe birds ate, and from what to expect on a night out with Dr Johnson to Samuel Pepys’s cure for a hangover. Want to know the longest palindrome in Morse code, or who The Great Masticator was? Curious to know what Norwegian steam is, or what a jaaaar is? The answers are all here.

For all of the logofascinated among us, this is an immensely pleasurable and unpredictable collection that is guaranteed to raise eyebrows (the literal meaning, incidentally, of supercilious).

‘Brilliant for anyone interested in the effervescent oddness of English’ –Stig Abell