When I was in seventh grade, I had a language arts workbook that asked us to fill in the blanks with one of four words. Approaches varied, but the idea was to give students a sense of the range of our language’s vocabulary and how to use it. OK, it could get a little twee: I remember a sentence instructing us in the meaning of “expatiate.” Not expiate or expatriate but expatiate. I’m not sure that lesson was necessary. But those exercises did leave me with a sense of our language as a great buzzing menagerie of words, many of which I didn’t yet know. I was excited about learning them.

But my girls — now in fourth and seventh grade at solid schools — tell me that they have never been instructed in anything like Ye Olde Language Arts. Instead, they are taught more general things such as how to structure a paragraph, along with instructions to write “expressively.” I have nothing but respect for their teachers, but the modern curriculums they are given to work from do not convey the sense that English — and by extension, all language — is a marvel.

I worry that my children will be left with the assumption, natural but unaware, that language is just words strung together. To think this is to lose out on wonder, and on great stories, too. Every word has one, like every creature and every nation. And not just the Latinate ones like “expatiate.”

A random example: the word “business.” It came to my mind not long ago when watching an antique musical talkie of 1929. I don’t recommend “So Long, Letty” unless you share my unhealthy fascination with the cultural detritus of the distant past. But in one song, the protagonist sings about her business yet uses the word in an entirely different way that reminded me how many stories the word has to tell.

Here goes. “Business” starts with “busy,” and the first mystery about busy is why it’s spelled that way. We are so used to seeing it that we may not notice how weird it is. You would think the word would be pronounced “boocie” or “boozy.” In fact, it was, in Old English — with the tight “oo” sound that French now has in words like lune for “moon.” An “oo” sound can drift into an “ee” or an “ih.” I once knew someone from suburban New Jersey who pronounced “shoes” with so little “oo”-ness that a Martian transcriber might think my friend was saying something more like “shizz.” It actually sounded quite normal. That’s how you get from boozy to “bizzy.”

So how do we get “business”? Once upon a time the word really did mean busy-ness — the state of being busy, in the way that happiness is the state of being happy. A Scottish poem called “The King’s Book,” from around 1400, describes “the little squirrel, full of busyness.” There was even an opposite word, busiless.