'The following Saturday afternoon [father] was a bit late getting home from work; he must have gone to the second-hand bookstall in the market. ...he handed me a book that was dropping to pieces. It was thin, with a dark green back. There were about fifty pages; there had been a lot more but the others must have dropped out. All the pages were loose. It was called "Guy's Expositor". It was just lists of words, but it told you where they had come from, and how their meaning had varied through the ages so that some words, eventually, came to mean just the opposite from what they had meant long ago. I was thrilled to the marrow with it...'