The word soul in Hebrew is nephesh. In Hebrew literature, nephesh means throat. Whatever else we make of words figuratively, and there is plenty to make of them that way as I’m about to show, we take literature literally for the same reason we take music musically. We start there so that it can take us somewhere.

The Hebrew language is earthy and imagistic, thick with metaphor, and nephesh is characteristic Hebrew. Think about your neck. It connects what thinks with what feels, to say nothing of everything else. Your neck or throat is where the wind goes up and down between your nostrils your mouth and your lungs. It’s a place where everything comes together. Everything has to go between the head and the body. Cut your neck and it’s all over. There’s nothing. No nephesh no soul, no ‘you’. Notice that the word itself doesn’t have anything to do with the invisible. It’s visible. It’s the neck, the throat.

On 22 May, 1986, my first child was born at 3:42 in the morning. After a long day prior of contractions and a longer night of labor, when our nurse and our obstetrician recognized that the baby was in severe distress, they rushed blessed Victoria and me too into the operating room where I watched my son Evan delivered by emergency caesarean section. When the coast was clear, I went out to a waiting room and closed the louvered doors of an old-fashioned phone booth to call my parents. The phone rang once, and again, then my father picked up and said hello. At the sound of his voice, all that I’d wanted to say I couldn’t say. I couldn’t speak. Something was stuck in my throat, and it was this recognition: All my life I thought I knew my parents loved me, and now I know I had no idea.

In the English language there are idioms that have nothing to do with Hebrew. Stuck in the throat isn’t one of them.

Celts invaded the British Isles millennia ago. After a few centuries of Roman rule, which ended in 410 C.E., tribes of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians came pillaging. The tribes must have been abetted by a superhuman force — perhaps a plague or a climate catastrophe — because their Germanic languages drove out the Celts’ Brittonic ones almost completely. Another group, the Vikings, began attacking from the north and east in 789 C.E., and the Vikings’ language, Norse, merged in time with Germanic tribes’ Anglo-Saxon. Perhaps because the Norse and the Anglo-Saxons despaired of learning one another’s word endings, the language they forged together had very few and instead defined the grammatical role of words by the order they appeared in. Anglo-Saxon bequeathed the most common words in English today — the, that, of, from, in, by, to, with, and and. Norse gave us loose, weak, scare; such nautical terms as storm and sea, and such metaphorically nautical phrases as clear the decks, second-rate, and show one’s colors. In 1066, when the Normans won the Battle of Hastings, their French-speaking aristocracy replaced the Anglo-Saxon-speaking one, and French became the source of words for war (siege, armor), morality (courtesy, courage), fashion (ermine, style), and law (jury, crime).

By the 14th century, however, the Norman-descended kings were speaking the English of their subjects. The language achieved a certain glamour (a Scots word, from grammar) in the hands of writers such as Chaucer (responsible for ambassador and intellect) and Bible translators such as John Wyclif (puberty, zeal) and William Tyndale (beautiful, scapegoat). After America was discovered, sailors brought home such new words as Eskimo, Abenaki for “eaters of raw flesh,” and avocado, Nahuatl for “testicle,” a shape the fruit resembles. With the advent of the Renaissance, French jetted forth yet again, imparting perfume, mediocre, and naïf, while Italian gave carnival, disgrace, and balcony. It was a fertile era; Mr. Hitchings reports that the works of Shakespeare “contain our first sightings of some 1,700 words.” In the 17th century, when wars of religion erupted, English speakers learned to distinguish carefully between what was a matter of fact and what was mere opinion, and the high-living Samuel Pepys introduced the phrase have a good time. In the 18th century, which saw the birth of charming and low-bred, the novelist Fanny Burney described a character as grumpy, and the novelist Laurence Sterne described another as good-tempered. And on Mr. Hitchings goes, until Hemingway borrows cojones from Spanish and the British borrow nark from the Gypsies to describe someone who finks to the police.

The 20th-century food writer Elizabeth David, Mr. Hitchings has discovered, was single-handedly responsible introducing into English the words bruschetta, taleggio, and salade Niçoise. Alas, not long after announcing this discovery, Mr. Hitchings is sent over the edge by the etymology of cappuccino and wanders unhappily into diffuse social criticism, regretting consumerism, cell phones, and the violent language often used to describe male sexuality. “Life insurance is really death insurance, after all,” he writes, a truth that no one needs to be told, but he’s had an exhausting tour through the linguistic databases, and he deserves to nap through the last dozen pages if he needs to. It isn’t fair to end on such a note, so in a desultory fashion more appropriate to the book, here’s a different one: Mr. Hitchings reports that the bikini was named in a 1946 marketing stunt for a South Pacific atoll ruined by an atom bomb a few days before a line of swimwear’s debut.

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from Caleb Crain’s review of Henry Hitchings’ The Secret Life of Words in the sadly now defunct New York Sun