‘Highly Irregular’ Review: An Eloquent Confusion

If the plural of “mouse” is “mice,” shouldn’t we refer to our neighbors living in “hice”? Can we really make up a story, a face, a magic potion and lost time, and also make up after a quarrel? Soon she will want to know why “of,” unlike other words ending with an “f,” sounds as though it ends with a “v.” From there it will be a short leap to laughing at the “l” in “salmon” and wondering by what strange process, linguistic as well as gastronomic, we ended up with “molten lava cake, laden with melted chocolate.”

Most adults, happy even to be permitted their hash browns, tend to acknowledge such peculiarities with a bemused smile or a shrug of the shoulders. But for Arika Okrent, genial perplexity isn’t a good enough response. Although we may not discern linguistic oddities until they’re baked into everyday usage, it is still possible to understand how they came into being. “All languages have their infelicities and awkward bits,” she declares, “but English has its own special kind of weirdness.” In “Highly Irregular,” her mission is to explain some of its more conspicuous kinks.

Ms. Okrent has previously published “In the Land of Invented Languages,” a portrait of the utopians and oddballs who have tried to create alternatives to natural means of communication. Drawing on five years’ research, it examined the inspirations and missteps that gave the world Esperanto, as well as less famous “constructed languages” (Láadan, Volapük, Blissymbolics, Loglan). “Highly Irregular” is a different type of book, not only in subject matter but also in tone: chatty, informal, brightly amusing. Though not explicitly aimed at adolescents, they are surely its natural audience—an impression compounded by the presence throughout of droll cartoons by Sean O’Neill, whose “Rocket Robinson” graphic novels resemble an American version of “The Adventures of Tintin.”

In bite-size chapters, with pungent titles such as “Why Do Noses Run and Feet Smell?,” Ms. Okrent investigates more or less familiar questions: Is the letter “y” a vowel or a consonant? What does it mean to say that the exception “proves” the rule? Why does English have so many synonyms? She also ponders whether “I am woe” would be better than “woe is me”; what egging someone on has to do with eggs; and why we don’t tell a restaurant server, “I’m a large spender. Make it a big pizza.”

Some of the answers could be fuller, and suggestions for further reading would be helpful. But the writing is vivid, accessible and often surprising. Take, for instance, the adverb “literally,” which today seems mainly to be an adornment of exaggerations: “I could literally eat the whole of Nebraska.” Plenty of commentators simply decry this. Plenty argue that the impulse to decry it is nothing more than fusty pedantry. Yet where others see an opportunity to score a point, Ms. Okrent observes a small part of a larger trend: “Literally” is being “whisked into the vast and ever-recruiting club of English intensifiers.”

“Highly Irregular” is not, as billed in the jacket copy, “a deeply researched history of English,” but it does provide a brisk account of the language’s development, focused on the endless tussle between logic and habit. American readers may take some pleasure in spotting that many of English’s really confounding inconsistencies can be traced back to events predating its journey across the Atlantic. Among these were the invasions of Britain by Vikings and Normans, which introduced alien habits of word formation and phrasing—without effacing the language’s Germanic character. Another source of confusion was, ironically enough, the standardization of English spelling, because it gathered pace in the 15th century, when pronunciation was in flux (courtesy of the phenomenon known as the Great Vowel Shift).

Ms. Okrent notes that establishing a model of correct usage became an obsession only in the 18th century, amid a more general zeal for organization and codification. There were sticklers before that, like the poet John Dryden, who insisted that it was inelegant to end a sentence with a preposition. Yet it was customary to exalt Latin as a language of rules and logic, whereas English was “just . . . something people did.” Few contributed more to changing this mind-set than Jonathan Swift, who in 1712 published “A Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue.” Swift has been the inspiration for countless other guides and arbiters who, faced with anomalies that are explicable but irksome, feel compelled to send the language to school.

Yet as reformers and quibblers have proliferated, determined to treat the eccentricities of English usage as an engineering problem, so have curators and chroniclers more inclined to regard them as the wild fruits of evolution. One of the most appealing features of “Highly Irregular” is its stock of poems and brain-teasers illustrating the language’s more absurd quirks. My favorite is this limerick, which, 140 years ago, graced a weekly newspaper in small-town Ohio: “There was a brave soldier, a Colonel, / Who swore in a way most infolonel; / But he never once thought / As a Christian man ought / He imperiled his own life etolonel.”

Mr. Hitchings is the author of “The Secret Life of Words” and “The Language Wars: A History of Proper English.”