If you like dogs and movies, then you should enjoy Citizen Canine: Dogs in the Movies, by Wendy Mitchell. Lots of dogs, from the silent films to present day (2018). Some times the dogs were paid more than the trainers. One dog learned all his commands for a second time, this time via hand signals when 'talkies' made voice commands unusable. Fun pictures, just the right amount of information.

Language is an ever evolving thing ... for proof try Made in America: an Informal History of American English by Bill Bryson. It is a twisted, convoluted (sometimes brutal) history. There were new ... well, everything from plants to animals that needed names. And when we moved west there were vast areas that needed names. New fangled inventions such as trains and cars needed new words for how they were used (depots, motels, etc.) Some names had no meaning but sounded nice, others were slurrings of foreign words. Airplanes and that industry needed words, so did the space age. Some times words were made to sound foreign even when they weren't! Kid's from the 1950's had their own language, and don't even get going on advertising lingo! Not my favorite book by Bryson, but he's done a good job here.

Reading Hermit With Dog