Etymology is a growth industry
One year of the Dead Language Society
I’m testing out a new feature today, and have also made this post available as an audio recording. Hit play above if you’d prefer to listen like a podcast episode!
If you’d told me a year ago that 34,000 people would sign up of their own free will to receive emails about Middle English vowel shifts and the etymology of the word “dog,” I would have asked what you were selling, or what you were smoking.
This newsletter began as a signup form on my website, where I shared the occasional post whenever I had something on my mind (shoutout to anyone here from the Winged Schwa days!). But, at the start of last year, fresh off the launch of the first modern graded reader for Old English, I realized that I wanted to get serious in my writing about the history of the English language.
So, the Dead Language Society was born: date of birth, January 29, 2025.
Now that we’ve reached a year into the project, I wanted to take a moment to express my gratitude.
Thank you for the space you’ve granted me in your inboxes. It’s been a true privilege to be able to share my love for the history of the English language with you over the past year.
I’d also like to thank my paid subscribers for supporting my mission to bring linguistics out of the ivory tower. Your support allows me to devote the time needed to research, write, and edit these articles. From the bottom of my philological heart, I thank you!
By the way, if you’ve been pondering whether to become a paid subscriber, I’m offering a one-time anniversary discount: 20% off an annual subscription for one year. The offer is running until February 11. More details about what’s coming up at the Dead Language Society below.
Now that the mushy stuff is out of the way, I want to share what I’ve learned over the past year: about writing, about audiences, and about what happens when you try to explain scholarly topics without the safety net of footnotes… well, with fewer footnotes!
After that, I’ll share a guide to what I think were the best posts from year one, and a look at what’s coming up in year two.
But first, some lessons from the field.
The ivory tower has poor wifi
You can’t write for everyone at once
Coming from an academic background, I’ve found that the hardest habit I’ve had to break is the compulsion to cover all my bases: to anticipate every objection, to caveat every claim, and to add a footnote to every assertion. As you can see from literally any article I’ve written over the past year, I haven’t entirely kicked that last habit.
But I’ve come to realize that there is always more complexity than you can fit into a single piece. When you’re writing for a general audience — even when that audience is composed, as mine is, of brilliant, attractive people, not to mention funny! — you need to show the essential outline of the topic first, to let them see the shape of the thing.
If readers want to get closer and appreciate all the nuance and complexity of the topic, they can. That’s what books and academic articles are for, and that’s precisely why you’ll find a reading list at the end of all my deep dive posts. But I’ve learned that I can’t add all of that nuance in the body of the text without losing the thread of what is most important about the topic.
And even when you feel like you’ve added enough complexity, you’ll still get people showing up in the comments to tell you that you’ve oversimplified things. There is absolutely no way you can stop this from happening, so don’t even try. It’s simply the price of admission for writing publicly about complex topics.
Besides, if you bog readers down with disclaimers and exceptions, not only will you still get those comments, but you’ll make it harder for the majority of your readers to follow what you’re saying.
Believe me, I get the temptation to hedge — I can’t even resist it 100% of the time — but focusing on the core message you’re trying to convey will always win the hearts of all but the most pedantic of your readers. (I love you too, pedantic readers!)
Readers will surprise you
I never would have predicted that my most popular posts would be about spelling: lost letters, the history of the alphabet, why English spelling is such a… well, the word disaster comes to mind, but, of course, I’m far too professional to use such inflammatory language.
My articles on these topics have travelled far beyond the usual linguistics crowd, getting shared on the likes of Hacker News, and reaching audiences I’d never have expected.
It turns out that people are fascinated by the history of spelling itself. Who knew? I’ll certainly be returning to this topic in the second year of the Dead Language Society.
Meanwhile, some of the things I expected to find a wider readership… didn’t. In some cases it’s because I didn’t get the headline quite right, but in others, I’ve been wrong about just how broad the appeal of the topic is.
For example, and in retrospect, I probably should have seen this coming, an article about the vagaries of early Germanic kinship systems probably isn’t going to be a breakout hit.
Either way, I’ve learned to pay attention when something resonates.
So I’ll ask you: what topics from the past year have you been most interested in? I’m always looking for ideas for what to write about next. Leave a comment to let me know what you think.
Finding your voice is a slow thaw
Looking back at my earliest articles from 2025, I can see how constrained my writing was. I’m not sure whether it was a holdover from academic training, but I had trouble putting much of myself into the prose.
Even then, I knew I needed to put some personality into my writing, especially in the age of AI, when writers with a voice are becoming an increasingly scarce resource. But I found it difficult nevertheless. Drafts would come back from my brilliant editor with notes like “It needs to be more you,” or the one I dread to this day, “Needs more pizzaz,” a note which serves to remind me to bring more Colin to my writing.
Eventually, however, I got over it. There was no moment of revelation where I discovered that the real writer was inside me all along. It was more like a gradual thaw, where I slowly became comfortable enough with the format to write in a way that expresses how I really feel about all these topics, which is to say, a kind of giddy enthusiasm.
Teaching is learning
There’s even a Latin proverb for this one: Docendo discimus ‘we learn by teaching.’
When I first set out a year ago to write these articles, I imagined that I would be writing about things I already knew well. My challenge would merely be to present them to a new audience.
This seems, in retrospect, naïve. Even when you have a good working understanding of a subject, the act of explaining it in writing to someone fresh to the topic is a perfect way to reveal all the gaps in your own knowledge.
I’d sit down to confirm a date or double-check a quotation, and before I knew it, I’d be three books deep into something I thought I understood, only to discover that I had far from the whole story.
For example, the research I did for the piece I wrote on Chaucer completely transformed my understanding of how iambic pentameter developed. I’d always heard that Chaucer invented iambic pentameter. And that’s true in a sense, but the reality is far stranger: Chaucer adapted continental models, but then the language changed, we lost lots of final vowels, and the metre’s logic was lost until later poets rediscovered it (possibly by accident).
If you want the full story, it’s in How the letter E almost ruined English poetry, one of my favourite articles from this past year.
This kind of discovery has happened again and again. I hope that my excitement, which comes from my experience of genuinely learning something along with you, is contagious. That’s always been my goal: to show you how much fun learning about linguistics can be, and it’s easier to show you that when I’m also having fun myself.
The moment I knew
Although I’m celebrating a year of the Dead Language Society specifically, my overall project of doing what people call public linguistics or linguistics communication, or, as I like to put it, “bringing linguistics out of the ivory tower,” has been going on for much longer.
I first started writing and teaching online back in 2021. I’ve been through different platforms, including Youtube, Twitter, and my own blog, and I had some modest success here and there.
I never imagined that Substack would be any different. But it has been. Substack is the first platform where I’ve felt that the niche I’ve carved out, writing about the history of words, has found real traction.
I first realized this in late March, when I published a piece on how the Black Death reshaped English. It was featured by the Substack Post, picked up some traction on Hacker News, and overnight the subscriber count jumped in a way it never had before. Now, it’s not good for your writing or your mental health to obsess over these kinds of numbers, but I’ll confess that this was an exciting moment. I thought, “Maybe there’s something to this Substack thing, after all…”
Honestly, I never expected historical linguistics to find an audience of this size. Etymology! Of all things! But that growth came from you: sharing posts with friends, recommending the newsletter, leaving comments that sparked new ideas.
The Dead Language Society exists because of its members. I’m just happy you’re here.
Season two
Now that I’ve gone through a year (and 200,000 words) of writing, I have a much better sense of what works for me, for you, and on Substack as a platform. To that end, I have a few minor changes to let you know about:
First, both free and paid articles will be coming out on Wednesdays, rather than having paid articles come out on Saturdays. This will help give you time to get through the paid article before the next comes out, and avoid the long 10-day gap we have now between the free article on Wednesday and the paid article on the following Saturday.
Second, I’m going to be experimenting with recording voiceovers for these articles, as I’ve done for this one. Think of it like a podcast version of the post that you can listen to whenever you like.
Beyond the general benefits of audio, I think this feature will be particularly useful for us because these articles often contain words from multiple languages or other things that the automated text reader does a poor job at. Also, we’re talking so often about how things sound that an audio track is worth a thousand words.
I need to see how much time this adds to the article preparation process, but I’m optimistic that we can fit it in. That said, I’d like to make sure it’s a feature that you’d actually use. So if you like the idea of audio voiceovers, or you’re currently enjoying this one, please let me know in the comments. That will greatly increase the likelihood that the experiment becomes a permanent feature.
It’s also time to tease an upcoming series. The working title is “Why is English like this?!” It will be a multi-part series (maybe 10–12 issues) telling the entire history of the English language in narrative form, focusing on all the accidents of history that have made English the strange beast it is today.
I’ve been dancing around this for a long time, telling smaller stories which relate to one aspect of the language or another, or that focus on a single period. Now it’s time to put it all together and show you the grand sweep of history as it has shaped this language of ours.
What questions about English have you always been curious about? Let me know in the comments: there’s still time to shape the direction of the series.
The obligatory sales pitch
If you’ve been on the fence about becoming a paid subscriber, now is the time. To celebrate one year of the Dead Language Society, I’m offering 20% off an annual subscription for the next week only.
Paid subscribers get access to the full archive, including all the deep dives and the upcoming “Why is English like this?!” series as it comes out. You’ll also be directly supporting my mission to bring linguistics out of the ivory tower, and helping me keep writing these articles for years to come.
This offer expires on February 11, 2026. After that, it’s back to the regular price.
Some light reading
Whether you’re a new subscriber, or you’ve been here from the beginning, here are a few of the posts from the first year that I’m proudest of:
The Viral Surprises. These are the posts that went out into the wider world, and brought many of you here in the first place. As it turns out, people are really interested in the history of writing:
The strangest letter of the alphabet. The lost letter yogh (ȝ) and its strange afterlife.
Why English doesn’t use accents. Weirdly, the French are to blame.
The invention that ruined English writing. How the printing press broke English spelling because it came just a few decades too early.
Weird Words. I started a series called “weird words,” which has a simple premise: I pick an everyday word and show how absolutely no one understands where it comes from. Some of my favourites:
“Dog” is a weird word. For some reason, European languages like ditching their word for dog, and replacing it with something completely different. English is no exception. This post even unlocked a dream of mine: to speak about the history of language on NPR!
“She” is a weird word. English used to have a perfectly good word for she, and we abandoned it in favour of a Frankenstein pronoun.
Deep Cuts. For those who want the more scholarly stuff, even if it involves the tiniest little bit of controversy:
How the Black Death reshaped English. Pandemic + social climbing = the most dramatic change in the history of the English language.
Don’t read Heaney’s Beowulf. A hot take on the internet’s favourite translation.
The ancient poetic law that explains basically everything. (paid) The 6000-year-old reason we say “ladies and gentlemen,” not “gentlemen and ladies.” (Homer would probably approve.)
That was year one. Thank you for reading, subscribing, commenting, and for sharing these articles with your friends!
Here’s to year two. See you next Wednesday.
Since you asked: I prefer to read the articles. Reading is my medium of choice. Just sayin'. ;-))
Love having the audio version! I'd really like that to continue.
Speaking of audio - is audiobook Ōsweald Bera still in the works? I need the pronunciation help :)