This book is such a lovely blend of informative, thought-provoking and entertaining. There are bits about etymology, both new and old:

So clear was it to residents of medieval Constantinople that their city was The City that they eventually renamed it as such—Istanbul is a variant of Middle Greek stambóli, from colloquial Greek s tan Póli, “in the City.” (The same pol as in “acropolis” or at the end of “Constantinople.”)

Lots of interesting cultural differences that seem obvious in retrospect:

Happy :) and sad :( emoticons can have the same eyes but must have different mouths, whereas happy ^_^ and sad T_T kaomoji can have the same mouths but must have different eyes.

And plenty of points wrapped in lovable silliness:

Sending someone all of the possible birthday party emoji is extra festive: great! But sending someone all of the possible phallic emoji (say, the eggplant and the cucumber and the corncob and the banana ) is NOT extra sexxaayy: that’s a weird salad.

There are a few broad themes in this book, all delivered with the author's obvious love of language and curiosity. The call for humility and understanding as language evolves is perfect:

This chapter, more than any other, is a snapshot of a particular moment in time and how we got that way, not a claim to correctness or immortality. What it is instead is a call to humility. To saying, if conversational norms are always in flux, and different at the same time among different people, let’s not be over-hasty to judge.

Perhaps my most geeky takeaway from this book is how language usage arguments resemble conflict resolution in a distributed system. After all, language is always evolving and those changes come from everywhere. As the author puts it:

When we thought of language as a book, we thought of it as static and authoritative, a thing which would be better if we returned to a pristine first edition and erased all the messy new words that people had scribbled into the margins. But there is no pristine first edition of a network. A network is not debased as it changes; its flexibility is a key part of its strength. So, too, is language enriched and made alive again for each subsequent generation as new connections grow and old ones wither away.

TL;DR - Highly recommended, great stuff.