Finale—Master Class

By themselves, word histories are a kind of butterfly collection. But now, we can examine an English sentence etymologically and perceive how the word histories represent the processes of language change and mixture worldwide. In While the snow fell, she arrived to ask about their fee, there is a riot of hidden history: grammaticalizations, vast layers of borrowings, single meaningless sounds that used to be whole words we will never know, rules that began as accidental byproducts of other ones now extinct, words that began as multi-word idioms in other languages, and even fascinating mysteries.