Terry Deary - Wicked Words

Word power

People say some daft things. Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me, they say.

Thats balderdash, I say. Here are some words that might hurt

So words can be quite, quite wicked. Wicked weapons. Baron Lytton even went so far as to say, The pen is mightier than the sword.

Throughout history words have meant POWER. In the late 1600s you could escape being hanged if you could read aloud the first verse of the 51st Psalm. This proved you were educated and you could get away with murder or to be accurate you got away with having your left thumb branded. (Though if you committed a second hanging crime then you went to the gallows even if you could read the whole of the Bible backwards.)

Reciting this neck verse was scrapped in 1705 when it was realized uneducated villains learned the words by heart! Alas, the ability to read no longer works in escaping punishment

Theres only one way to get your hands on this amazing power of words. Know more about words than anyone else in the world! Read this book and you can know more than anyone in the entire universe! (Oh, I forgot to mention words also give you the power to exaggerate a bit.)

In the beginning

In the beginning was the Word At least, thats what the Bible says. But of course we dont actually know what that word was.

Somebody can probably tell you what your first word was. When you sat on your newly filled nappy and said, Pooh! your adoring mother probably looked at your proud father and said, Oh, darling. It said its first word!

But what about the very first word of all? Its not as if some prehistoric human said, Unk! then stopped, looked at its mates and said, Hey guys! Ive just said the first word ever!

We can only guess the sort of things those early speakers talked about from the way they ran their lives. Intelligent human-like apes called Neanderthals, were the first creatures to wear clothes, make weapons and bury their dead. Piles of animal bones showed that they ate anything they could get their hairy hands on. If they had language then it must have been dead simple.

Then along came a newer ape called Homo sapien s . Look at their piles of old animal bones and what do you notice? They are much more organized. Bison in one season, deer in the next and so on. How did they do that? They must have been able to use words to say things like,

What happened next? Neanderthals died out, Homo sapiens survived and became people. People like you and me only a bit uglier than me. (I dont know about you.) That was the power of words. They were the difference between survival and extinction. (If dinosaurs could have talked then you might have been turning these pages with your prehensile tail.)

The power of words probably allowed Homo sapiens grown-ups to pass on their wisdom to their children. Imagine it. With the power of words came the power of teaching. The first teachers were probably language teachers and theyre still at it.

Of course it was a couple of million years before humans got around to inventing writing. Among the first things they wrote were the things that had happened to them. They invented that other horrible subject History!

So Wicked Words and Horrible History go together and here they are for the first time in one book.