MANY WORDS are puzzles themselves. “Conundrum” confounds scholars; “bamboozle” beguiles them. Anatoly Liberman, an etymologist at the University of Minnesota, explains why in “Origin Uncertain”, a delightful romp through the annals of words’ origins.
Compiled from some 20 years of blogs he wrote for Oxford University Press, “Origin Uncertain” takes a broadly thematic approach. He covers words that are “bizarre, misbegotten and born by mistake”, such as punk, spunk and funk, and terms with “troublesome phonetics”, including the related words sneak, snack and snuck.
