A WORD IN YOUR EAR

For those addicted to dictionary loitering this will prove a welcome new companion, for, with two English books combined (A Word in Your Ear and Just Another Word), the editor of the London Observer compiles an anthology of his wartime researches into the quality, history, life and feeling of words. Words handpicked and of personal interest, to be sure, but the resultant collection is lively, unusual, and a blend of familiar, old and often strange words, whose use, and/or misuse, the author discusses with his own verbal felicities. He has a fine feeling for sound as well as meaning; he is harsh on officialese, on prolixity, on awkward manipulation, and he offers for revival some pleasant elegancies and hardy vulgarisms. If you want a word for it -- tried and true but never stale nor tired, Ivor Brown's your man, happily, linguistically able to make words come alive.