Wonders in Words

About this book

If all you know about a word is its spelling and its meaning, you sometimes don’t know the half of it. As a matter of fact, you don’t know its parents are, who its relatives are, or what pictures may be hidden somewhere within it.” Do you know how a flower, this sign *, a spaceman and an accident are all related? The flower is an aster which is Greek for star. The star-shaped sign is an asterisk. Another name for spaceman is astronaut, literally a sailor among the stars, and an accident is a disaster-something that happens contrary to the “lucky” stars under which you were born.