Wordplay

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

The cover blurb for this book states that “Helga [Williams] has always
loved language. Her passion for playing with words has taken her to
Scrabble tournaments from South Florida to Western Canada.” In
Wordplay, she shares that delight, and readers from middle school
through adulthood will have fun impressing and dumbfounding friends and
acquaintances with the new additions to their vocabulary.

Given the book’s formal division into two parts, Williams should have
provided an explanatory introduction. Taking up almost three-quarters of
the book, Part 1, which is organized thematically, appears to be the
“play” section, wherein readers are introduced to entertaining
language trivia, such as the “shortest and longest words,”
“strange words from the animal kingdom,” and “North American words
and their British counterparts.”

Part 2 seems to be the “teaching” section, for it begins with six
pages of prefixes and examples of their use before moving to a “Words
to Live By” segment. Apparently, these words, alphabetically arranged
from “ablution” to “zwieback” with accompanying definitions, are
those that readers should consider adding to their working vocabularies.
While words like “adverse,” “cogitate,” and “placebo” could
find their way into most people’s conversations, discovering
opportunities to use others, such as “ovoviviparous” (definition:
“producing eggs that develop in the body of some fishes and
reptiles”) may be difficult. Williams is most “parsimonious” in
her use of pronunciation guides to assist readers in saying new words
correctly.

Though juvenile readers may need to be introduced to Wordplay, once its
delightful contents have been discovered, the book will be devoured.
Recommended.