Studies in Words

Language - in its communicative and playful functions, its literary formations and its shifting meanings - is a perennially fascinating topic. C. S. Lewis's Studies in Words explores this fascination by taking a series of words and teasing out their connotations using examples from a vast range of English literature, recovering lost meanings and analysing their functions. It doubles as an absorbing and entertaining study of verbal communication, its pleasures and problems. The issues revealed are essential to all who read and communicate thoughtfully, and are handled here by a masterful exponent and analyst of the English language.

C. S. Lewis explores the fascination with language by taking a series of words and teasing out their connotations.

C. S. Lewis was famous both as a fiction writer and as a Christian thinker, and scholars sometimes divide his personality in two. Yet a large part of Lewis's appeal, for both his audiences, lay in his ability to fuse imagination with instruction. "Let the pictures tell you their own moral," he once advised writers of children's stories. "But if they don't show you any moral, don't put one in."