Praise words

How do you begin to sort through the more than 3,500,000 place names found in the US? In Erin McKean’s Verbatim (Pimlico, £12.50) – the questions are almost more interesting than the answers in these essays from the eponymous language quarterly. Richard Lederer’s “The world according to student bloopers” is a must: its trail of the misheard, the misunderstood and the mistaken winds from ancient Egyptians in “dessert cultivated by irritation” to the “cure for rabbis” attributed to Pasteur. Dotted throughout the book are ambiguous scraps of writing. “The new British Library – sitting comfortably on enlarged piles” was spotted…