From reading to writing. You find a passage that thrills you in print, and another on the same topic that is so dull you need another cup of coffee just to finish it. When you want to write, you have to get clinical with the mother tongue, find out what it does well, what it does poorly, how to make it sing or cry. A positive outlook is usually a virtue, but when you want to learn to write, sometimes the best way is to watch someone strip an inferior work down to its components and show you how it fails. Probably the best-known example of this is Mark Twain's chain saw massacre of the "Last of the Mohicans" author, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses."

I recently spent an unfortunate week as a member of a Yahoo! club dedicated to "literary criticism," where I got to watch a couple of people expertly mock anyone who didn't toe the marxist-feminist line. Nobody seemed to have the slightest interest in literature. But how they loved to bicker about critical theories, and about what one critic said about another critic. It made my head spin, and I said so, and I got called a pompous middle-aged male ass or something like that, and I dropped out of it, telling them I'd rather spend an hour reading Shelley than a lifetime among their ideological duels. The passion for writing and the argument about it never seem to dwell together. It was the difference between writing love letters and collecting postage stamps. The sad thing is, the bullies in that club are all professors of literature somewhere or another. But Adrienne Rich is a poet whom I always find provocative as a critic ("What is Found There"), and she leads me to poets for whom I have no natural affinity, like Audre Lorde and June Jordan, and allows me to respect and enjoy them. Her passion for poetry by outsiders is a guiding light, but she won't turn her back on a writer on the grammatical grounds that he happens to use "he" to refer to all people. We may disagree on everything except a love of poetry, but that is enough.

In college, I developed a fondness for late 18th century poetry -- Cowper, Collins, Gray, Kit Smart, Goldsmith. Perhaps it was my perverse interest in whatever is most obscure, least admired. I was an English minor undergrad, and noticed that the literature offerings skipped right from Pope to Wordsworth, omitting 50 years of writing. So I dug them up and read them and thought they were great fun. The reason for their modern unpopularity jump right off the page: self-expression was at a low ebb in those years of poetry, buried under strict rules and a fully developed convention. Yet that's what often makes this poetry so surreal to modern ears, and what does it say about poetry that, from that age that wrote such controlled verse, three of the names on my list (along with their contemporary, Swift) died insane?

From that infatuation I retain whole chunks of Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" by heart, along with much of Collins and a few other pieces by Gray. And I have an old four-volume set of Cowper's letters. Cowper was the most timid, refined old-ladyish poet imaginable, yet he wrestled with a religious depression that would have killed most of us. And out of it all he wrote the most charming, erudite, self-effacing letters to his friends. They are not great poets, but every reader is entitled to choose a few favorites from the second tier. Or, as Samuel Johnson said, "Parnassus has its flowers of transient fragrance, as well as its oaks of towering height, and laurels of eternal verdure."

Johnson's "Lives of the Poets" is interesting as a stage in the evolution of English literary criticism, as a clever collection of insights into minds great and small, but I love it as an example of the most stately English prose ever written. Johnson's mind married classical learning and vernacular wit, and the rounded sentences and well-chosen words of his little biographical sketches represent a high point of expository writing. English has been receding ever since.

H.W. Fowler's "Modern English, first published in 1926, isn't really a reference book; it's the kind of book you thumb through in your leisure hours to discover gems, like a chart listing the different types of humor. I have a dog-eared second edition of it, but you'll have to go to the used book store because the 1996 third edition is a botch. It tried to make the work less eccentric, more tolerant, and more user-friendly. Instead, it stripped away the book's defining virtues, which are its firm grip on the common sense of English grammar and syntax, and its grumpiness.

From fascination with one's own language to curiosity about its family tree. Another book that's more fun to ramble around in than it is to read straight through is "The Loom of Language" by Frederick Bodmer. This 1944 tome must have been a Book of the Month Club selection, because every used bookstore I visit has a few copies of it. It's an audacious book by a Swiss professor who charts the family ties of English and its closest relatives, the Germanic languages, then tours the globe looking at each major language group in turn and showing why it's not as good as English. What is it about this bastard child of Anglo-Saxon and Latin that makes so many continental European professors fall in love with it? I'm thinking also of the splendid Otto Jespersen. If anyone has an old copy of his long-out-of print "History of English Grammar" lying about the house, you have a willing buyer in me.

There's something wonderful about books by people who are obviously in love with their discipline and fairly falling over themselves to share their enthusiasm for it, like George Gamow's books on physics, or some of the Anglo-Saxon language texts I've been reading lately.

Since I finished writing my West Chester history book, I've plunged that daily effort into learning Anglo-Saxon, also known as Old English, with pretty good results. I've read the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a number of prose romances, and worked my way through some short poems. It's great fun, good mental exercise, and it makes you a better writer and editor, by focusing you on the strong, hard, grim words that are the oldest of our tongue, rather than the sesquipedalian borrowing out of accent-less French and Latin that clutter up so much modern prose.

Here's some of the strangeness of English that you discover when you wash away the soil and examine its roots.

The bulk of the core vocabulary of English is made up of recognizable Indo-European root words, shared by most languages from Iceland to India. But there also are a number of words from a hypothetical "Northwest European" provenance, which would be a cluster in the Indo-European family that comprises the ancestral tongues of the Italic, Celtic, Baltic, Slavic, and Germanic languages. These words presumably descend from a common Bronze Age culture, and they consist of roots not found elsewhere in Indo-European languages, or which have different meanings in them. The vocabulary itself is largely cultural -- many of the words are agricultural terms or names of animals and plants found across this range. "Grain," "apple," "sow" (the pig) and "seed" are among them. But we can't know whether these words were borrowed from some long-extinct language of the pre-Indo-European inhabitants of these lands, whether they developed independently, or whether they were words from within the Proto-Indo-European lexicon that have been lost by all the other languages (this seems the least likely explanation).

English is a Germanic language, under the French, but a surprising number of our most basic words are unique to the Germanic languages -- "bath," "boat," "drink," "drive," "evil," "finger," "hand," "sea," and possibly "earth" and "little."

Learning an ancient tongue brings strangeness into the world. The familiar turns out to be exotic. Take colors, for instance. "Frigg Spinning the Clouds" (left) is blue. Blue is blue, right? The word ought to be recognizable and unchanging over millennia. But names of colors turn out to be among the most slippery words. I had already encountered Homer's "wine-dark" -- oinopos -- an adjective which Homer uses 17 times of the sea and twice of oxen, and Sophocles uses once to describe someone's arm. And ancient Greek references to the star Sirius, an icy blue to us, as "red." When I started reading Anglo-Saxon, I saw that the spectrum of color there, too, was not divided as it is now. In Beowulf, yellow is the color of linden wood (used to make shields). The favorite color-adjective for gold, however, is red.

Many surviving color words from Old English -- dun, wan, sallow, bleak, dusky, swarthy, bright, murky, dark -- refer to colors which are not hues. These words have more to do with chroma (reflectivity, brightness, quality of light) than with hue (wavelength). We tend to think of color only as hue. Out of all this you can get an insight into that world. Look around you and subtract all the artificial, man-made pigments from your world. Then look at what is left, and you may see why glitter and dark mattered more than pink and purple in naming what you see. Northern Europe through most of the seasons is a landscape of brown, gray, and dull green. The eruptions of color in spring and fall must have been brief and amazing, with an almost hallucinogenic intensity.

Old English brun and hwit both meant "bright, shining," though now both are used to mean hues (although we still speak of "burnished" wood or metal). One of the knottiest linguistic problems in Old English is blaec, which is the common ancestor of the seemingly irreconcilable modern words black and bleach. The Old English word seems to have been used to refer to a type of colorlessness.

Numbers, also, are surprisingly strange. English, like many other Germanic languages, retains traces of a base-12 number system. This duodecimal system, according to one authority, is "perhaps due to contact with Babylonia." The most obvious instance is "eleven" and "twelve" which ought to be the first two numbers of the "teens" series. Their Old English forms, enleofan and twel(eo)f(an) are more transparent: "leave one" and "leave two." Old English also had hund endleofantig for 110 and hund twelftig for 120. One hundred often was hund teantig. The -tig formation ran through 12 cycles, and could have bequeathed us numbers "eleventy" (110) and "twelfty" (120) had it endured, but already during the Old English period it was being obscured. However, in measures of some specific products (including boards and certain types of fish) the "great hundred" of 120 persisted into the 16th century, and hundredweight often meant 112 or 120 pounds.

The Scandinavian branch of the Germanic languages (preserved in Old Icelandic) used hundrað for 120 and þusend for 1,200. Tvauhundrað was 240 and þriuhundrað was 360. Older Germanic legal texts distinguished a "common hundred" (100) from a "great hundred" (120). In Old Norse, the distinction was hundrað tolfrøtt "duodecimal hundred" and hundrað tirøtt "decimal hundred."