This book* by John McWhorter is a scintillating romp across the history of Albion, and the surprisingly wide array of people who've arrived, lived, died, fucked, killed, spoken and written there. The central premise is delightfully simple and is consistently paid off more and more with each chapter - ENGLISH IS WEIRD AS FUCK. Generally most Anglophones are, I think, aware of this basic reality, but prefer not to think about it, as attempting to untangle the logic of some of our most commonplace grammatical quirks can be as totally disorienting as if one had just been presented with an ancient unsolveable riddle. Who's to blame? Nobody really - it's just a shambles, with Celts, Jutes, Angles & Saxons, Danish vikings and those bloody French all getting variably involved, twisting shared syntactical formats almost-but-not-quite to breaking point Over & Over Again, the regular speakers of this malshapen mongrel language child basically just keeping calm and carrying on. And here we are. Fascinating stuff. Also poignant ground for that strange phenomenon that as one ponders the natural histories of language it is difficult to not also toy with a smallish variety of anarchistic axioms. Whatever they are.
* Confession time - I didn't read this book. I got it for free on an Audible trial (and then uninstalled it forever because fuck you Jeff Bezos) and listened to the whole thing while on a walk across northwestern Sheffield's outskirts. Given the nature of the book I'd 100% recommend listening to it rather than reading it because McWhorter himself narrates it & as you'd expect from an archaeo-philologist he genuinely knows how to pronounce all the stuff in Middle English, Old English, Old Norse and whatever else, and so you really get a feel for how the sloppages of evolution went down.
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