The other day, leafing through T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, which enchanted me as a child, I was bedazzled all over again. This time, though, it wasn’t the plot and characters that gripped me, but something better: vocabulary. ‘Summulae Logicales’, ‘Organon’, ‘astrolabe’, ‘metheglyn’, ‘snurt’, ‘craye’, ‘varvel’, ‘austringer’, ‘yarak’: all appear, exuding magic, within
