Language

dictionaries, grammar, spelling, language use, and slang

dictionaries, grammar, spelling, language use, and slang

The Oxford History of English

December 24, 2012 by Roy Johnson

academic essays on the development of English language

This is an updated version of The Oxford History of English which is now available with the claim that it’s ‘a book for everyone interested in the English language, present and past’. A reasonable claim – though one might wish to add the caveat: ‘suitable for everyone embarking on detailed academic research into the history and mechanics of English’. Because it is certainly not for beginners. It offers a detailed and scholarly history of the English language, starting as far back as 1500BC.

And as Lynda Mugglestone’s useful introduction claims, the volume encompasses not only standard forms of English but also varieties stemming from geography, status and culture. The book comprises fourteen chapters, each written by a different linguist and representing a variety of interests, which makes the volume invaluable to students of linguistics up to post graduate level. Time-lines, language maps tables and charts complement the textual information. A phonemic table is also included and this is essential to the understanding of some language development explanations such as the Great Vowel Shift.

Nothing essential to the study of the English language is omitted and this is given zest by frequent examples from literary works or artefacts, and by the implicit enthusiasm shown by the contributors. For example, Marilyn Corrie quotes the original of a Middle English text, along with the translation, showing a homely but avid interest in study skills.

And whoever may wish to write this book out again on another occasion, I ask him that he write it correctly, just as this book teaches him.

This is a neat reminder that books at one time could only be copied by hand, one at a time.

North American English and its formation is dealt with, including citations of additions from Native American terms and usages – such as the native term Skunk. Other examples of English that have acquired semi-detached status are cited and these specifics are used to lead into the universal principles of language change, observable over thousands of years.

Techniques for the analysis of language mechanisms are eloquently explained in the chapter Dialects and Diversity. Reference to rhyme and poetic metre show the development in a quasi graphical manner that is very pleasing to read.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gets appropriate consideration as do various Anglo-Saxon sermons and poems. The advent of Christianity is used to demonstrate the gradual transition from paganism as reflected in poetry. The establishment of a written vernacular is documented with due reference to King Alfred as possibly the first educator in English, via The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

The volume deals in detail with Germanic influences and the French influence that followed it. Issues such as ‘high’ and ‘low’ languages and the imprint left on a society after the departure of conquering nations are all included in a comprehensive and detailed history.

Considering more recent developments, Tom McArthur traces the status of English during the Twentieth Century with a quaint but comprehensive world map showing English language usage.

In his conclusion David Crystal not only charts the observable influences on English of the Internet and its devices, but he also gives his own prospective notions for the future of the language.

Each chapter is given its own lists of suggestions for further reading, and the book finishes with a huge bibliography. Although the level of detail is on a minute scale, the content is easily accessible, navigable and readable, given some prior knowledge on the part of the reader.

I would gladly give The Oxford History of English to anyone embarking on a language-based programme of study, or to any dedicated amateur student of the English language, its history and its prospects.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Lynda Mugglestone (ed), The Oxford History of English, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp.600, ISBN: 0199660166

More on dictionaries
More on language
More on literary studies
More on writing skills

The Real McCoy

June 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the true stories behind our everyday phrases and sayings

English is incredibly rich language, full of colorful and unusual phrases and sayings. This is one of those books which offers explanations for commonly used expressions. For instance, why do we say ‘know your onions’, ‘straight as a die’, and ‘the apple of your eye’? The answer in the last example is that the pupil was once supposed to be round. The Real McCoy is unusual as an expression in that nobody really knows its true origin.

Another typical example is ‘Mad as a hatter’. I knew this one, because it comes from the mercury poisoning used in felt hat manufacture – a former speciality in the town where I live. Most of the entries are very short. However, there are occasional special sections dealing with groups of – such as Biblical expressions, colours, eating and drinking, foreign countries, legends and myths, parts of the body and expressions coined by Shakespeare. Most of the entries are ploddingly obvious. I think that just about everybody knows that ‘full of beans’ means ‘lively and in high spirits’ and that the origin comes from vegetable protein.

However, there were one or two expressions I had certainly not thought about, such as ‘curry favour’ which has nothing to do with cooking or the Indian subcontinent, but comes from the expression curry as in to groom a horse with a coarse brush or comb.

And I certainly didn’t realise that a devil’s advocate was originally an official Catholic appointment during the process of beatification. The person’s role was to challenge the case being made for sainthood.

It’s an easy and lightweight approach to the subject. The entries come with no evidence or credible sources, and there’s no bibliography or list of further reading.

This could be useful as a Xmas or birthday present for someone who hasn’t yet thought much about the quirky nature of language. For something more substantial you will need to go to books such as The Oxford Dictionary of Idioms or Michael Quinion’s Port Out, Starboard Home.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Georgia Hole, The Real McCoy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.200, ISBN: 0192806114

The Usual Suspects and Other Cliches

July 1, 2009 by Roy Johnson

all the low down and the full monty on street-cred lingo

At first you might wonder why anybody would want to look into the origins of a cliché. But the more I read the examples in The Usual Suspects, the more they emphasise the tired, stale nature of expressions we often take for granted – or even worse, sometimes use without thinking first. This of course is based on the widely held belief that using cliché is a stylistically bad thing – though there are some people who actually defend them. (They can also be used ironically, but that isn’t taken up here.)

These issues are debated by Betty Kirkpatrick in the introductory essay to her collection which considers both the definition of cliché (when does an expression become a cliché for instance?) and the various categories of cliché. She debates intelligently with authorities such as Fowler and Eric Partridge and even considers how clichés blend easily into idioms, proverbs, catchphrases, vogue phrases, and allusions. Her entries run from the proverb cliché absence makes the heart grow fonder to You wish! and zero hour. She includes both traditional clichés, as in beat about the bush, and more recent usages such as spend more time with my family – which is what politicians and public figures say when they’ve been sacked – which neatly combines cliché with euphemism.

She also identifies what she calls ‘filler clichés’ such as at the end of the day, you know what I mean, and with all due respect. My own pet hates – used repeatedly, day after day by Sean Rafferty on BBC Radio 3 – are as it were and so to speak, both completely meaningless fillers which send me reaching for the off switch or tuning in to Jazz FM.

So a typical entry in this collection runs as follows:

push the envelope is an idiom cliché which is also a vogue cliché. It means to try to achieve more than seems possible, to take a risk, as A good coach is constantly driving the athlete to break new barriers, encouraging him to push the envelope. The cliché dates from the turn of the twentieth century, but the phrase may go back to early aviation test flights (1940s) where the ‘envelope’ refers to the line on a graph that represents the limit of an aircraft’s known capabilities.

It’s interesting to notice that in some clichés – such as flotsam and jetsam – the words in the phrase are almost never used separately from each other.

Most of the explanations listed are quite easy to understand – as in the case of to spend a penny. Even young people must know that this was once the standard charge for entering a public toilet. But maybe non-English readers will not. For this reason I suspect the book might be specially useful for people with English as a second or other language.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Betty Kirkpatrick, The Usual Suspects and Other Clichés, London: A & C Black, 2005, pp.222, ISBN: 0713674962

Totally Weird and Wonderful Words

July 8, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a dictionary of obscure, unusual, and bizarre terms

Do you know what illecebrous, langsuir, and telematology mean? No – I thought not. They are ‘attractive’, ‘female vampire’, and ‘the study of peat bogs’ respectively. Not a lot of people know that. Of course, you might say that not many people would want to know that. But if you are one of the exceptions – people who are fascinated by etymology, unusual words, and obscure terms – Totally Weird and Wonderful Words is the book for you. It’s a collection of really out-of-the-way lexical items and words you have probably never heard of before. Entries run from abligurition (spending a lot on food) and abnormous (18th century, ‘mis-shapen’) to zoonosis (disease transmitted from animals to humans) and Zyrian (a north Russian language).

The alphabletised entries are interspersed with mini-essays on various categories of obscure terms, and laced with lots of New Yorker type cartoons. The weirdness of the entries might lie in a word’s obscure meaning, or it might be its unusual orthography – a strange conjunction of letters, as in kalokagathia (nobility and goodness of character).

It doesn’t pretend to be encyclopedic, but I was surprised that one of my own favourite obscure terms wasn’t in there. Borborygmous means ‘rumbling of gas in the stomach’ – and despite its quasi-medical connotations it always brings a smile to my face. But another of my favourites is included. Carphology is ‘the delirious fumbling with bedclothes prior to the onset of death’. Not a word you would need to use every day – but when applied at the right moment, very impressive.

Some which make sense (to a UK audience at least) are terms such as brannigans (the name of a chain of wine bars) which means ‘a drinking bout, a spree, or a binge’. And sometimes the examples are perfectly serious and reasonable – such as steganography, which is ‘the art of secret writing, or cryptography’.

Some are made up, such as igry, which is defined as ‘the way you feel when someone else does something that ought to embarrass them, but doesn’t’. Others are fanciful technical or quasi-scientific inventions.

There’s even a chapter at the end of the book giving you advice on how to create your own weird and wonderful words. However, you should remember that language is entirely democratic. New words will only ever become established if lots of people decide to use them – and that is usually because there’s a need for them. You could struggle for years putting together scientific and Latinate parts of speech – but unless there’s a real need for them, they will die unused. Meanwhile blogging, dogging, and gazumping have caught on because they serve a real purpose – though none are listed here.

Some of the words are clearly deft inventions; others are squeezed out of interpretations of classical terms (it helps if you know Latin and Greek); and others have interesting etymologies, but turn out to be disappointing. It’s interesting to know that there is a word for people who elect to have amputations for the sake of body modification, but somehow disappointing to learn that the word when you get there is only the rather plain nullo.

Some fall into the technical category of what might be called ‘extreme jargon’, as in the following definition of the term contango:

the fee that a buyer of stock pays to the seller to postpone transfer of the stock to the next or any future settlement date. It was also usually paid on a per share or percent basis. The word also has a modern meaning, ‘the condition in which distant delivery prices for futures exceed spot prices, often due to the costs of storing and insuring the commodity’. The antonym of contango is backwardation.

Phew! So now we know.

Many are so obscure it’s difficult to imagine there ever being an occasion when they might be used – either in conversation or in print – such as dromaeognathous, which means ‘having a palate like that of an emu’.

In keeping with its total weirdness, this is a book with three introductions and two forewards. In fact you can open it at any page and be amazed or amused – or both, simultaneously.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Erin McKean (editor), Totally Weird and Wonderful Words, New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp.304, ISBN: 0195312120

More on language
More on literary studies
More on writing skills
More on creative writing
More on grammar

Treasury of Sayings and Quotations

July 29, 2009 by Roy Johnson

origins of quotes, proverbs, and expressions

This Treasury of Sayings and Quotations is a compilation of phrases, bon mots, and observations from sources all over the world. Some are well known, and others are novelties drawn out of the data-bank of human wisdom from all over the world which you are invited to enjoy or send into further circulation. Oxford University Press do a lot of these quotation dictionaries: their Humorous Quotations, Catchphrases, Idioms, Literary Quotations, and Modern Quotations are all very popular.

The distinctive feature in this compilation is that it has multiculturalism writ large in its selection of materials. They range from the folk-like African proverb When the spiders unite, they can tie up a lion, to the more obviously urban Russian maxim, We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us. The categories are arranged alphabetically – from Ability and Africa, through Marriage and Memory, to Women, Words, Writing and Youth. Then the entries under each topic are arranged chronologically – so, under Writing we go from II Maccabees in the Bible, to Derek Walcott in the Guardian of 1997.

I come from a backward place: your duty is supplied by the life around you. One guy plants bananas; another plants cocoa; I’m a writer, I plant lines. There’s the same clarity of occupation, and the same sense of devotion.
Derek Walcott 1930

Shakespeare of course crops up in more categories than you can shake a stick at [which is not listed]: The course of true love never did run smooth (Midsummer Night’s Dream) and Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance? (Henry IV, Part 2).

It’s been brought up to date with entries such as shock and awe, dodgy dossier, and the mother of battles which cast a chilling light on the people who used them in the last few years.

It includes well-chosen words from Biblical times to the present day, proverbs from around the world, and well-known phrases and quotations, giving their sources and revealing the contexts from which they emerged. There are even explanations of terms as unlikely as this from the world of recreational drug use:

chase the dragon
take heroin by heating it on a piece of kitchen tin foil and inhaling the fumes. The term is said to be translated from Chinese, and to arise from the fact that the fumes and the molten heroin powder move up and down the piece of tin foil with an undulating movement resembling the tail of the dragon in Chinese myths.

More than a thousand new items have been added to the latest (fourth) edition. I am never quite sure what use people make of these compilations, but once you open them, they are very difficult to close. It’s the easy browsing I suppose – plus the fact that every entry is a gem of condensed human experience.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Oxford Treasury of Sayings and Quotations, Oxford: Oxford University Press (4th edn) 2011, pp.720, ISBN: 0199609128

More on language
More on literary studies
More on writing skills
More on creative writing
More on grammar

Troublesome Words

May 31, 2009 by Roy Johnson

A-Z of problematic English words – with explanations

Before he became a best-selling travel writer, Bill Bryson worked as a sub-editor on The Times. This is a successful guide to problems of English language he wrote for journalists at the time, now updated and in its third edition. It’s arranged on an A to Z basis – running from abbreviations and acronyms, through mean and median (know the difference?) to wondrous, years’ time, and zoom. He explains words we commonly misunderstand, words we confuse, tricky issues such as foreign terms, and points of grammar such as split infinitives. And he does this with all the verve and wit which have made him such a well-loved writer.

He’s particularly good at showing the subtle distinctions between similar words (such as amid and amongst) and words which are easily confused (such as blatant and flagrant).

I couldn’t agree with him on data being a plural noun – but he does invite readers to challenge his judgements. You have to be on your intellectual toes. Sometimes his explanations are rather cryptic

Comprise means to contain. The whole comprises the parts and not vice versa.

But the correlative of this is that he packs a lot in. And occasionally this terseness works entirely to his advantage:

When something is not working properly, it is defective; when it is missing a necessary part, it is deficient.

The reason there are all these problems with English is that we have so many different terms for the same thing. Bill Bryson explains all this in his other excellent book Mother Tongue, to which this is a follow-up. He also throws in all sorts of extras – such as how to pronounce the name of the fish coelacanth (see-luh-kanth).

You will almost certainly learn about the meaning of words you never thought about before. Did you know the difference between ‘expectorate’ and ‘spit’ for instance?

There’s a very good bibliography and a glossary. Anybody interested in sharpening their writing skills will profit from reading this book. It’s a reference guide, a tutorial, and a very entertaining insight into language niceties for the general reader.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Bill Bryson, Troublesome Words, London: Penguin Books, 3rd edn, 2009, pp.256, ISBN: 0141040394

Txtg: The Gr8 Db8

June 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

text messaging analysed, described, and defended

Ever since Text messaging first began there have been moans and complaints that it was lowering standards of literacy, corrupting our youth, and bringing about the collapse of Western civilization. Even the normally rational John Sutherland, writing in the Guardian, complained about texting:

Linguistically, it’s all pigs ear … it masks dyslexia, poor spelling and mental laziness. Texting is penmanship for illiterates.

David Crystal has answers for every one of these common objections. Texting isn’t even that new: writing in abbreviated forms has been around for a long time. Other languages (such as Hebrew and Arabic) do not use vowels as part of their writing system. In actual fact, the amount of abbreviating and acronyms such as ROFL is quite small. And most convincing of all to me, users in other languages all follow more or less the same ‘rules’ for abbreviation.

What’s more, the use of pictograms and logographs have been around for a long time; the rebus or word puzzle is an ancient tradition in UK and other cultures; and reducing terms to their initial letters is deeply enshrined in our culture – as in pm, NATO, eg, asap, OK, and GHQ.

The same is true for omitting letters, or ‘clipping’ as it’s known technically. Mr and Mrs are cases in point. Any form of word shortening makes complete sense in an SMS system, and nobody has any problem failing to recognise Tues(day), approx(imately), biog(raphy), mob(ile), gov(ernment), poss(ible), and uni(versity.

Crystal has a good chapter on the amazing literary aspirations of the SMS poets and writers – people who compose haikus, short stories, and even serial novels using this extraordinarily restricted form.

In terms of users, women are more adept and enthusiastic than men, and another interesting feature he reveals is that text messaging was late to take off in the USA – for two reasons. One was that phone calls were cheaper there, and the other is that many people need to drive to get about, unlike European countries and Japan, where the country is smaller and more people use public transport.

The content of text messages varies from personal greetings and co-ordinating social activity to political electioneering, advertising, and even schemes to quit smoking. Crystal lists plenty of examples which I imagine will be good stimulus material for the A level students doing language projects who will find this book particularly useful.

At a more advanced level, he also looks at how other languages handle text messaging. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that all of them do more or less the same thing, though some even mix English abbreviations with their own language – which is called ‘code-mixing’. This is an example from German:

mbsseg = mail back so schnell es geht (‘as fast as you can’)

He ends by allaying the fears of all those who think text messaging lowers any kind of standards of literacy, or communication. In fact the reverse is true. And to prove that he’s done his homework he ends with a huge glossary of terms and multiple lists of text message abbreviations in eleven different languages. U cnt gt btr thn tht!

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

David Crystal, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.256, ISBN: 0199571333

More on digital media
More on technology
More on theory

Whitaker’s Almanack

July 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

world-famous one-volume reference and encyclopedia

Whitaker’s Almanack is an easy-to-use and instantly accessible reference book for the home, the workplace or the classroom. It contains the latest information on the social, political, and economic infrastructure of the UK and the rest of the world – all in one single plump volume. It was founded by Joseph Whitaker in 1868, publisher and part time editor of The Gentleman’s Magazine. To help with his work, he compiled a book of newspaper cuttings, extracts from government statistics, astronomical charts, calendars and anniversaries.

This source material became the basis of Whitaker’s Almanack, which was an instant success – and it has been updated annually ever since. Its main curiosity value is that it contains information which would be difficult to locate anywhere else. It’s useful on history and social structure, and it details most of the UK’s institutions with names and contact details. There’s extensive data about every country in the world, as well as maps, recent obituaries, and a run down on last year’s main news stories with pictures.

It’s packed with thousands of facts, figures and statistics plus descriptive and directory information on astronomy, sport, literature, and current affairs. The latest edition also includes hundreds of essential facts and figures on government and politics, the legal system, countries of the world, education, finance, media and communications, religion, royalty and the peerage.

You can look back over the year’s news in month-by-month summaries, check who is the MP for any UK constituency, find out time zones, currencies and exchange rates, or look up laws on births, deaths, marriages, employment, consumer and property rental.

Find contact details for a university, museum or society, and search directory listings of newspapers, magazines and book publishers. The latest edition even has a section on cinema and films.

There’s extensive data on every country in the world including its geography, history, politics, defence, economy, communications, education and culture.

As a bonus, there are expert overviews on a range of subjects from archaeology and broadcasting to Acts of Parliament, sports results and weather.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Whitaker’s Almanack, London: A & C Black, 145th revised edition 2012, pp.1200, ISBN: 1408172070

More on dictionaries
More on literary studies
More on writing skills

Word Myths

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

debunking linguistic urban legends and false etymologies

You know that the term posh comes from an acronym formed from the expression ‘port out, starboard home’? And that ‘the whole nine yards’ comes from the amount of fabric needed to make a kilt? Well you’re wrong: they don’t. This is a study of word myths and linguistic urban legends – why they arise, what they mean, who tells them, why they are told, and what they tell us about ourselves in terms of language and common usage. What David Wilton does is subject a series of ‘explanations’ for well known expressions and sayings to close historical scruitiny.

As a result he demonstrates that ‘Ring-a-ring o’ roses’ is not about the plague, and that Eskimos – sorry! Inuit – do not have 500 words for snow, where we have only one. The truth is that we have lots, and so do they, but they make compound single words, where we use expressions such as pack ice. The outcome of his scholarship corresponds roughly with that of Michael Quinion, whose Port Out, Starboard Home explores similar territory. The main lesson to be learned seems to be that the more attractive and anecdotally interesting the explanation, the less likely it is to be true.

Disproving legends does sometimes become a little repetitively negative, but along the way there’s a lot of interesting socio-linguistics, language etymology, comparative linguistics, and cultural history. He even includes an instructive note on how to use dictionaries for language searches.

There are also some interesting detours into the realms of acronyms, back-formations, bogus history, ‘Elizabethan emails’, and many other justifications for completely false explanations of the origins of words and expressions.

He gives his opponents the benefit of the doubt from time to time, but takes quite a stringent line throughout:

Another factor in the popularity of the [pre 20th century] AWOL tale is the fact that the Civil War is a topic much loved by hobbyists and amateur historians. Any topic that excites the passions of hobbyists and fans tends to generate false etymologies.

He is certainly very well informed, and evidence for his claims is meticulously sourced. Disputes over the origins of the word jazz occupy several pages. And he deals as well with acronyms, backronyms, and eponyms – ascribing abbreviations, initial letters, or people’s names as the putative origin of a word, as well as the false etymology and political correctness in terms such as picnic, Indian, and gay.

You might think that so much effort in debunking what are often attractive anecdotes would be a dispiriting reading experience – but somehow it isn’t. In fact the opposite is true: it enhances one’s respect for good scholarship and the love of language.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

David Wilton, Word Myths, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp.240, ISBN: 0195375572

More on dictionaries
More on language
More on literary studies
More on grammar

Word Origins

May 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

The hidden histories of English words from A to Z

The average contemporary English speaker knows about 50,000 words. A large proportion of this total will actually be derived from Greek, Latin, French, and the Germanic languages. It is also estimated that every year, eight hundred neologisms are added to the English language. These include acronyms (nimby, from ‘not in my back yard’); blended words (motel, from motor + hotel); and those taken from foreign languages (savoir-faire). The entries in John Ayto’s Word Origins run from aardvark to zombie, laid out in an A-Z format with detailed cross references, and written in a style that is both authoritative and accessible.

This is a valuable historical guide to the English language, aimed at students, general readers, and anybody who has an interest in words. For a full understanding, it helps to have at least a smattering of language history, which he provides in an amazingly compressed introduction. For instance, he gives as an amazing example the linguistic connection between the two apparently dissimilar terms bishop and spy. Indeed, his entries on individual words offer interesting potted histories

bishop [OE] Bishop originally had no ecclesiastical connections; its Greek source, episkopos, at first meant simply ‘overseer’ from epi- ‘around’ and skopein ‘look’ (antecedent of English scope, and related to spy). From the general sense, it came to be applied as the term for various government officials, and was waiting to be called into service for a ‘church officer’ as Christianity came into being and grew. The Greek word was borrowed into ecclesiastical Latin as episcopus (source of French éveque) and in more popular parlance lost its e-, giving *biscopus, which was acquired by English in the 9th century.
> SCOPE, SPY

Of course a great deal of our vocabulary is borrowed from or based on Greek and Latin, but a huge variety of other languages have contributed to our current lexicon of around a million and a quarter words.

This richly mixed heritage helps to explain not only why the lexicon is the world’s biggest, but also why so many words are difficult to spell, and why there are so many different terms for the same thing.

One of the benefits of a book like this is that its explanations are all sourced in a scholarly fashion, which lends credence to them. And at the same time they are offered in a very entertaining manner. I’ll certainly be more careful about using the term gobbledegook in future.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

John Ayto, Word Origins, London: A and C Black, 2nd edn, 2005, pp.554, ISBN: 0713674989

Language

dictionaries, grammar, spelling, language use, and slang

academic essays on the development of English language

the true stories behind our everyday phrases and sayings

all the low down and the full monty on street-cred lingo

a dictionary of obscure, unusual, and bizarre terms

origins of quotes, proverbs, and expressions

A-Z of problematic English words – with explanations

text messaging analysed, described, and defended

world-famous one-volume reference and encyclopedia

debunking linguistic urban legends and false etymologies

The hidden histories of English words from A to Z

Get in touch