Trying to dismantle our tower of babble

According to Arika Okrent, author of the superb "In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language" (Spiegel and Grau, $26), the last 900 years have seen at least 900 attempts at creating new languages - and that is only the ones we know about. Everyone confronts language's limitations and vexations once in while, but there is a certain sort of person who doesn't accept the situation as being merely part of the human condition. You could call such people loonies - in the nicest possible way - and Okrent admits that it is the "overblown ridiculousness" of language inventors that first drew her to look into the subject.

There is, however, a good deal more than eccentricity involved here as Okrent shows with brisk dispatch, wit, and a good deal of compassion. Approaches to language invention have reflected and even distilled the preoccupations of the eras from which they sprang. The second half of the 17th century in England, for instance, was especially rife - or rich - with language schemes. The decline of Latin and the rise of scientific experimentation and philosophical empiricism, as well as the founding of the Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, furthered the idea of developing a universal, rational language. The strategy of most of the attempts at this time was to make reality and language agree, as if the root of linguistic problems lay in words' failure to accurately signify preexisting concepts. None of these schemes made it off the page and into speech, if only, as Okrent puts it, because "when you speak in concepts, it's too damn hard to say anything." Still, one of the most impressive of such constructs is that of John Wilkins (an early promoter of space travel), which became the basis, a couple of centuries later, for Roget's Thesaurus. Advances in mathematics also suggested hope for clearing up muddles and prompted at least one sally into the field, Cave Beck's "The Universal Character By Which All Nations in the World May Understand One Another's Conceptions" (Kessinger, $22.95). All you need to know to give you a sense of this language's eloquence is that "p2846" means "hired mourners at funerals" and "r2654," "a looseness in the belly."

Late 19th-century Europe, an arena of national and ethnic conflict, gave rise to a different motive (simple communication) and method (reduction, amalgamation, and simplification) for devising a universal language. The most famous of these is, of course, Esperanto, whose inventor, Ludwik Zamenhof, was born in Bialystok, a city in Poland made up of four distinct ethnic and linguistic groups: Russians, Poles, Germans, and Jews. Feeling "the heavy sadness of the diversity of languages," Zamenhof devoted himself to creating a language from common roots and pared-down constructs that could be easily learned and which would inevitably bring harmony among the peoples of the earth. Okrent, who is both gently amused and sympathetic, follows the development of the language, its valiant aspirations, the campaign to spread it, the schism within its ranks, its detractors, and its imitators. The names of Esperanto's competitors, Okrent observes, "read like the product of the perverted etymological strategies of the modern-day pharmaceutical industry:" Ido, Ulla, Ilo, Auli, Ile, Ispirantu, Espido, Esperandi, Mundelingvo, Mundlingu, Europal, Europeo, Uropa, Perfektsprache, Simplo, Geoglot, Interlingua, Glosa, Globaqo, Novial, and Hom-Idyomo.

Okrent goes so far as to attend an Esperanto congress in Havana, admitting that beforehand "the clearest mental picture . . . I could muster was five gray-haired radicals on folding chairs bantering about the Spanish Civil War and their stamp collections." What she finds instead is quixotic perhaps, but strangely vital. Beyond Esperanto, she investigates a number of other invented languages, their creators, and speakers - if any.

The inventors and proponents of invented language tend to be bizarrely optimistic about the possibility of improving the world.

In salutary contrast, allow me to present Amy Stewart. This is the woman who brought us the news in "The Earth Moved" that the friendly earthworm is destroying the forests of the upper Midwest and in "Flower Confidential" that the cheerful cut flowers we buy are, for the most part, evil incarnate. If I had any doubt before that she shares my own fascination with the canker in the rose, it has been dispelled by her new book, "Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln's Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities" (Algonquin, $18.95).

"I am enchanted by the plant kingdom's criminal element," Stewart tells us. "There is something beguiling about sharing their dark little secrets." And what ghastly secrets they are. Did you know that a mandrake plant's shriek of pain when pulled from the ground will kill you? Well, that's what the ancients believed. Fortunately, Stewart passes on an old method of pulling the plant by employing a dog, so that "even if the screams killed the dog, a person could still pick up the root and use it." She shows us the dark side of dozens of plants, not just killers, mythical and real, but also intoxicants, invaders, nuisances, stinkers, and such odious parties as the slobber plant - to say nothing of those that cause Cave Beck's "r2654." Along with spelling out the dangers of well-known offenders - lilies of the valley, rhubarb leaves, and potato and tomato plants - she unveils the seamy side of such apparently benign vegetables as celery. The book is wonderfully enhanced by spooky drawings by Jonathon Rosen and etchings by Briony Morrow-Cribbs.

Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net.