"In a decidedly unstuffy look at the staid world of languages, Elizabeth Little uses her favorite examples from languages dead, difficult, and just plain made-up to reveal how language study is the ticket to traveling the world without leaving the comforts of home. Little's exploration of “word travel” includes Shona, a language lacking distinct words for “blue” or “green,” why Icelandic speakers must decide if the numbers 1-4 are plural, which language is the only one lacking verbs, and just what, exactly, the Swedish names of Ikea products mean.

Fully-illustrated with hilarious sidebars, Biting the Wax Tadpole also addresses classic cases of mistranslation. For example, when Chinese shopkeepers tried to find the phonetic equivalent of Coca-Cola in Mandarin, the characters they chose were pronounced “ke-kou ke-le.” It sounded right, but it translated literally as “bite the wax tadpole.” Not quite what Coke had in mind, but in this off-kilter ode to the words of the world, it's just another example of language taking you someplace interesting."