Native Tongues - Lapham’s Quarterly

Native Tongues - Lapham’s Quarterly: When seen in full, Cassidy’s 325-page book of questions does not merely inspire awe. It also has a kind of poetry about it, the interrogations evidently made to blend lexical efficiency with literary elegance. They run from simple temporal inquiries, like Question A1—What do you call the time in the early morning before the sun comes into sight? to the fill-in-the-blank Question 0047b, a query that relates, improbably, to the sweating of horses: They wouldn’t have caught cold if they hadn’t_____(so much.) In between are all manner of word-inquiries. Most are slyly innocent, others are more blatantly invasive.