You see it in Strunk and White, you see in bibles on good writing, and you even see it in essays on this Web site: the command to use Anglo-Saxon words instead of Latin ones. In response I’ll use a very non-Anglo-Saxon word: hogwash!

Where did this meme start, and have the people who spread it really studied the history of English?

Let’s go back, way back, before the birth of Greenwich Mean Time…. The first people to arrive on the island we now call Britain were the Celts (also called the Britons). They were soon joined by Scots, Picts, and some Latin dudes who wandered over from the Roman Empire. Then, round about the fifth century, the Germanic Angles, Saxons, and Jutes arrived from the continent, through what are now known as Holland, Germany, and Denmark.

These barbarous tribes brought with them the seax (a terrifying blade from which the Saxons got their name) and a language that had been mixing it up with Latin for centuries. As linguist David Crystal points out in The Stories of English, the vocabulary of English “has never been purely Anglo-Saxon, even in its Anglo-Saxon period”!

Anglo-Saxon did eventually form the basic stock of Old English, enlivened with a smattering of Celtic and Latin words. St. Augustine brought new ingredients from Rome, Danes added some sustenance of their own, and then the Normans spiced things up with French and more Latin. By the time of Shakespeare, English was a rich verbal stew—then the Bard added all kinds of coinages to the pot.

That didn’t stop early language mavens from craving a pure, purée-smooth English. In the sixteenth century, John Cheke suggested that words with Latin and Greek origins be replaced by words with Old English roots, and in the nineteenth, authors like Dickens and Hardy sang the virtues of an all-Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. In the twentieth century, George Orwell took up the banner, arguing in “Politics and the English Language” that “bad writers are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin and Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.” In other words, good writers don’t rely on words with Latin roots (or, for that matter, any non-Germanic roots).

Orwell’s point—and it’s a fine one—was that straightforward, punchy words should trump pompous, polysyllabic ones. Point taken. And it’s true that a lot of obtuse abstractions (ameliorate, disintermediation, subaqueous) have Latin roots. Second point taken. But here’s the thing: English has always borrowed nice, crisp, short, specific words from other languages. Of the following 24 words, can you tell which are Germanic in origin and which ones were snatched from Latin: belt, bin, cat, cook, craft, cup, day, dog, earth, god, gold, home, light, pan, pit, pot, red, sack, sock, stop, sun, wall, wife, work? See the answers here.)

And what’s the matter with early imports from Scandinavia (cake, crooked, dregs), France (bacon, ginger, proud), and Frisia, aka Holland before it was Holland (island)? (Props to David Crystal for most of my examples.)

Today 80 percent of our vocabulary comes from “foreign” sources, including these perfectly good if very un-Anglo-Saxon words: ballot (from Italian), banshee (Scots Gaelic), bungalow (Hindi), garage (French), gong (Javanese), goulash (Hungarian), junta (Spanish), kahuna (Hawaiian), kiosk (Turkish), llama (Quechua), marmalade (Portuguese), mentsh (Yiddish), robot (Czech), slim (Dutch), sofa (Arabic), tomato (Nahuatl), tycoon (Japanese), window (Old Icelandic), yen (as in desire, Chinese).

The next time someone tells you to “prefer the Anglo-Saxon,” offer to edit his or her copy with a well-sharpened seax.

Hah! you say. What could glamour have to do with grammar? I’ll convince you in a minute, but for now let me just say that I’m not the only one enthralled by the mysteries of syntax.

I might be the only one so enthralled, though, to be writing a new book that will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about verbs but were afraid to ask. That research is taking me deep into the library stacks, as I review the history of English, bone up on linguistics, and track down little-known texts. It’s also taking me deep into the narratives of some of my favorite writers, who know exactly when and how to deploy those little words to make sentences pulse.

Here, for example, is Jonathan Raban, describing the melancholy landscape of Eastern Montana, in Bad Land:

…In forty miles or so I hadn’t seen another vehicle. A warm westerly blew over the prairie, making waves, and when I wound down the window I heard it growl in the dry grass like surf. For gulls, there were killdeer plovers, crying out their name as they wheeled and skidded on the wind. Keel-dee-a! Keel-dee-a! The surface of the land was as busy as a rough sea—it broke in sandstone outcrops, low buttes, ragged bluffs, hollow combers of bleached clay, and was fissured with waterless creek beds, ash-white, littered with boulders. Brown cows nibbled at their shadows on the open range. In the bottomlands, where muddy rivers trickled through the cottonwoods, were fenced rectangles of irrigated green.

Many people wouldn’t think to use so many verbs in a scene description: they wouldn’t think to show us a wind making waves and growling like surf; they wouldn’t hear the killdeer plovers crying out their name and wheeling and skidding. They wouldn’t see brown cows nibbling at their shadows and muddy rivers trickling through cottonwoods. This is the kind of passage I’m craving!

Do you have a favorite piece of writing, in which a true stylist uses verbs to such exquisite effect? Post it below, in the comments section! Or, if you’re shy, email me (connie-at-sinandsyntax.com). Please cite it properly, with the name of the author, the title of the book (fiction or nonfiction), and the chapter or page number where you found it.

I’d like to offer a little incentive: if it’s really good, so good that I decide to use it in the book, not only will I give you credit for finding it, I will send you a copy of a cool volume that has came across my desk: The Glamour of Grammar, by Roy Peter Clark (New York: Little, Brown, 2010). Clark explains that in Scottish English the word grammar (which once meant mastery of all arts and letters) evolved into glamour (which referred to a mastery of magic and enchantment).

Send me passages with verbs that are all magic and enchantment, and I’ll send you The Glamour of Grammar!