Read the Dictionary

When I was a kid I read the dictionary as an absorbing book, sometimes browsing in it for hours. There’s a lot you can learn from it besides the meanings of words, like why we eat venison and not deer. It’s the same reason we eat pork and not pig, or beef instead of cow: because the food names are the French words, brought over by the Normans. The Saxon who took care of the animal called it a sheep; after it had been slaughtered, cut up and presented to a Norman lord, it was called mutton, because mouton was what the people in the big house ate. Then there are surprises in the dictionary, too, like atonement, which sounds nearly as Latinate as prevaricate. But atonement, as it turns out, comes from “at one”; it means “at one-ment.” That’s interesting.
Robert Pinsky, Paris Review