About the Author

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author

Long ago, in the mists of the distant past when I was eight or nine years old, I was at a friend's house. There, I saw a Superman comic - nothing unusual about that as I had read quite a few. However, this one was different - it was called Delta, except that that's not what I saw because it was in Greek - Δελτα. I was fascinated to see a different alphabet for the first time, and it started off a lifetime of investigating and learning about language, and learning languages.

At school I studied Latin and Greek to advanced level, and went on to study Russian and Linguistics at university. My career in teaching English for over thirty years has given me a wonderful opportunity to investigate and analyse the history of our wonderful language. A few years ago I started a project to trace every modern English word derived from Latin and categorise them under their original Latin roots. After I completed the research, I started writing a book about the journeys of these words into modern English, but then I put the Latin project on the back burner and decided to start another one, widening the scope to research words with strange and unusual histories from a variety of languages, and this is the result. Well, half the result, as I've only covered half of the words that I've researched. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it and come back for more when it's ready.