Etymology is like chocolate: dispensable but irresistible. Words hopping from one language to the next, shape-shifting, gaining new meanings…
Take our sharp. Or rather skarpo, the word used by the Goths (a Germanic people who neither built cathedrals nor dyed their hair black) for ‘sharp thing’ or ‘pointy thing’. In the Early Middle Ages, this was borrowed into Italian, where scarpa came to mean ‘shoe’. After all, most shoes are somewhat pointy, and mediaeval fashion sometimes prescribed them very pointy indeed. A common alternative was the diminutive scarpetta, which somehow sounds even pointier.
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Much as I enjoyed your book Lingo, I was surprised to read your description of Yiddish today. In your book you describe Yiddish speakers as mostly older survivors while the next generation speak it at best as a second language. It is not surprising therefore that you are pessimistic as to its future.
Gaston Dorren, language writer 