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Every entry in this book about folk etymology follows the same format: “Here’s this word or phrase. People say it originates with this far-fetched etymology, but they’re wrong, it’s actually this mundane etymology.”

I certainly learned a lot of trivia tidbits from this book, but I couldn’t consume more than a few per day before they got monotonous.

This is the kind of book that needs to be dipped into for short reads. To consume the thing top-to-tail is a pretty big undertaking.

Recommended by Zatty after we were talking about Watership Down.

It's weird that the title of this book is exactly one of the folk etymologies that the author is keen to dispel. I guess it's what sells.

From the tsundoku pile.

I shouldn’t expect too much from a first-time author under the Del Rey label, but Shade & Shadow feels like two stories—one about magic research, one about the murder—smushed together. The former wasn’t really hashed out properly, and the latter was acceptable but with some poorly chosen red herrings.

@jfinkhaeuser@bookwyrm.social I was gifted this a couple of years ago and I am still dipping into it. Agree it’s not something you’d want to read more than a page or two of as a time. So many of the words are melancholy or of loss, best sipped at sparingly.

Picked five stories in this collection, published in the 1970s and 1980s. Bounced off two of them. Annoyed at Bear’s depiction of women in two more of them—one featured negative portrayals of sex work and one simply had no women in it. I can get better stories than these.

A collection of short stories by Bear from the 1980s. I’ve been bouncing off 1980s sf lately because of its pervasive cishet maleness, so let’s see how far I get.