Let’s start a campaign. A campaign to bring back a word than no one uses any more. Sorglufu: the Old English word that means ‘amorous love tinged with sorrow or regret’. What a wonderful word for a human emotion that is commonly enough experienced to deserve a word of its own! Let’s start a campaign to reinstate ‘sorglufu’ to the lexicon.

Sorglufu. If I repeat it often enough, maybe it’ll stick.

I love words. I love the English language (even though I’m Scottish!). I love it so much that I own five different editions of the Oxford English Dictionary. In the full version of that masterpiece of lexicography over 300,000 separate words are defined. If you include slang, dialect (and maybe the odd Scottish word), I reckon the full vocabulary of the English language could be enumerated at over half a million words.

And I love every aspect of our language: from writing, to editing, and to publishing too. Stephen Fry talks about ‘the juicy joy’ of language, and I get what he means.

Sometimes it’s the sheer pleasure of a perfectly turned phrase that you go back and read over and over again; sometimes it’s a clever play on words; sometimes just the perfect, satisfying rhythm of a sentence.

Funnily enough, when I founded my little publishing business way back in the 1980s no one told me that I’d spend so much time writing and editing, and it has been a constant joy to me that these diverting and pleasurable activities have formed such a large part of my working life.

English is such a rich and varied language, more complex and perplexing than almost any other. I know a little French, a little German, even a little Latin and Italian, and they are mostly logical, sensible, well ordered and codified. But English? No. And that’s what helps make it such an endless joy to work with.

Many of you reading this BookMachine blog will be avid readers; many of you will be aspiring editors, publishers or writers. And many of you will feel similarly toward the language. So much so that you’d like to find a career wherein you can indulge your passion?

I know a bit about careers that involve writing and English: both as a publisher and editor, and now, more recently as a university teacher of those subjects. I’m particularly proud to have developed a new university course that lovingly combines everything in one neat package. We call it BA Writing and Publishing.

Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t carve out a successful and satisfying career in this area. The possibilities are boundless. Maybe you could become a copy-writer; maybe a fiction author; a poet? A literary agent; a marketing bod composing blurbs and headlines; an editor; a publisher? A journalist; a magazine writer; perhaps even a laureate.

If you’re interested in any of this, drop me an email. And I’ll know you’ve read my blog if, somewhere, somehow, you include the word ‘sorglufu’!

Thanks for reading.

Alistair Hodge is the MA Publishing Course Leader at Derby University. He has been a non-fiction publisher for over thirty years, during which time he has been a business leader and manager, and commissioning editor.