The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson covers this pretty well. Along with covering many other quirks of the English language.
As an introductory book to a eccentric topic though, it works.
It's biggest asset, imo, is that Bryson isn't a linguist, and manages to make some obtuse concepts relatable, without getting bogged down in technicalities. Similar to what Michael Crichton could do with cutting edge sciences. (Granted, he kept mostly to fiction.)
Whereas the most basic begginer's article written by a linguist is still indecipherable to me. And linguists seem to be ok, or even happy, about that.
Linguists writing about a linguistic Lockheed A-12 would be aghast that anyone could ever mistake it for an SR-71, let alone be willing to explain the differences to the casual observer, or even make the mental effort to see how someone might mistake the two.
So as an engineer that hates the casual misuse of technical terms, I get you. But like the model of the atom, sometimes teaching the simplified but wrong model has its benefits for a certain crowd, until they're ready to go deeper.
Bryson gets many, many details about the history of English wrong as well.
> As an introductory book to a eccentric topic though, it works. It's biggest asset, imo, is that Bryson isn't a linguist.
No, Bryson is a hack writer and does more harm than good. You make it sound as if the only alternative to Bryson is eggheaded scholarly publications. In fact, there is a wide selection of popular-science treatments of the history of English and other languages that are both reliable and friendly and accessible for ordinary readers (for example, Melvyn Bragg’s The Adventure of English does right what Bryson set out to do).
It is like with archaeology: if an ordinary person wants to learn about the Pyramids, there is no need for someone to recommend Graham Hancock to them as if otherwise they would have to read obtuse archeological-dig reports and disputes among scholars.