Language

dictionaries, grammar, spelling, language use, and slang

dictionaries, grammar, spelling, language use, and slang

Dictionary of Proverbs

August 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

explanations, history, and origin of proverbial sayings

A proverb is a traditional saying which offers advice or presents a moral in a short or pithy manner – as in You can’t have your cake and eat it. Now reissued and updated, this reference dictionary provides the reader with over 1,100 of the best-known English proverbs from around the world. For this fourth edition, the explanatory material has been expanded and new, recently coined proverbs added including Another day, another dollar, Bad things come in threes, and Better to live one day as a tiger than a thousand years as a sheep.

The collection makes a useful point that proverbs fall into three main categories. First, abstract statements expressing general truths (Adversity makes strange bedfellows); second, everyday experiences which express a general truth (Don’t put all your eggs in one basket); and third, classical examples of advice and warning (Feed a cold and starve a fever).

This is the first time that the Internet has been tapped to provide examples, which range from Absence makes the heart grow fonder to If youth knew, if age could.

Many of these expressions are traditional, but proverbial coinings continue into the present day – as in the recent There’s no such thing as a free lunch. And many are surprisingly modern – such as A change is as good as a rest, which dates from the end of the nineteenth century.

There are also thematic entries which take a key word and record the proverbs which use it – as in the following example:

old see also BETTER be an old man’s darling, than a young man’s slave; you cannot CATCH old birds with chaff; there’s no FOOL like an old fool; there’s many a GOOD tune played on an old fiddle; HANG a thief when he’s young and he’ll no’ steal when he’s old; … and so on …

A typical entry records the proverb with key word highlighted, then a record of where the phrase has appeared since its first appearance in print:

the HAND that rocks the cradle rules the world
1865 W.R.WALLACE in J.K.Hoyt Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations (1896) 402 A mightier power and stronger Man from his throne has hurled, For the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world. a 1916 ‘SAKI‘ Toys of Peace (1919) 158 You can’t prevent it; it’s the nature of the sex. The hand that rocks the cradle rocks the world, in a volcanic sense. 1996 Washington Times 10 May A2 The habits of the home in one generation become the morals of society in the next. As the old adage says: ‘The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world’. cf women

Chronologically, the dates of the examples span from Old English After a storm comes a calm (1250) to contemporary notions such as When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

Sometimes explanations of the origins of these expressions are offered; sometimes not. There’s a bibliography and a thematic index.

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Jennifer Speake, The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 5th edition, 2008, pp.400, ISBN: 0199539537

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Dictionary of Quotations by Subject

August 2, 2009 by Roy Johnson

memorable sayings by the clever and famous

Dictionaries of quotations used to be about ‘Who said that?’, whereas now people want to know ‘What has been said about this?’. In this new type of dictionary from Oxford University Press, you can do both. The latest volume in their newly revamped series of dictionaries is arranged by topics – ranging from traditional categories such as Courage and Love to more recent subjects like Computers and the Internet.

It’s a collection of over 9,000 quotations, covering an enormous range of nearly 600 themes, from over 2,400 authors. They are arranged alphabetically, and you can check who said something about which topic via an extensive double index of names and themes.

The general approach is to split categories down into smaller and more specific topics. So, instead of The Press, there are entries listed under Journalism, News, Newspapers, and Press Photographers. Gerald Priestland observes:

Journalists belong in the gutter, because that is where the ruling classes throw their guilty secrets.

The quotes themselves range from Julius Caesar and Jane Austen to Tony Blair and Madonna, and where the quotation needs a context to be appreciated, this is provided. Not that it does in the case of Lytton Strachey on his death bed:

If this is dying, then I don’t think much of it.

A book such as this is useful when racking your brains to recall where the lines quoted by an actor in a film came from. Surprisingly, many of the most famous, such as ‘Play it again, Sam’ and ‘Come up and see me some time’ turn out to be mis-quotations. And the best all seem to be propelled by deep feeling – even when it is self-mocking, as in the case of George Best:

People say I wasted my money. I say 90 percent went on women, fast cars, and booze. The rest I wasted.

The American ragtime pianist Eubie Blake struck a similar note when he commented, on becoming one hundred years old:

If I’d known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.

There are some brilliant one-liners, such as Stephen Fry’s ‘Reading newspapers is like opening a piece of used lavatory paper’ and Mae West’s ‘A hard man is good to find’. Woody Allen is also well represented – as in his bon mot on bisexuality:

It immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.

This type of compendium has three possible uses. It can serve as a straight work of reference if you are stuck for the source of a famous quotation; you might dip into it for bedtime relaxation; and it’s the sort of book which some people would keep in the lavatory for a few moments of light relief.

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Susan Ratcliffe (ed), Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 5th edn, 2006, pp.580, ISBN: 0198614179

Dictionary of Rhyming Slang

August 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

rhyming slang explained and brought up to date

Would you know what to do if you were left on your Jack Jones for a day with the saucepan lids? Rhyming slang originated in early nineteenth century London. Everyone knows that apples and pears = ‘stairs’, and whistle and flute = ‘suit’. Here’s how the system works. The rhyming word is the second of a pair, and the connection is not always obvious – as in Derby Kelly = ‘stomach’ (belly). But usage is made more complicated by the fact that it is the first, non-rhyming word which is spoken – so you go up the apples to bed, not the pears. This new Dictionary of Rhyming Slang explains explains all the well-known terms, and many you will never have heard of before.

If that is not complex enough, the inventive and playful strain of rhyming slang is seen in the tendency to transfer via rhyme from the original term to more and more remote associations – as in bottle and glass = ‘bottom’ (arse), which becomes bottle; but that in its turn is rhymed with Aristotle, which is shortened to arris, which then in its turn is rhymed with April in Paris. Are you still with us?

The most commonly used terms in John Ayto’s amusing collection are coined for the perennial slang topics – body parts, sex, the lavatory, crime, drink, gambling, illness, and death. But he also covers such topics as work, sport, and even household objects.

It was once thought that rhyming slang was dying out, but the recent fashion for using celebrity names has proved this not to be true – as in [the now disgraced] Garry Glitter = ‘pint of bitter’, abbreviated to a Garry of course. The alternative might be to order a couple of Britneys (Spears).

All the people whose names have been memorialised in this way are given thumbnail biographies. Thus, the cast immortalising haemorrhoids includes Michael Miles, Nobby Stiles, Valentine Dyall, and Emma Freud.

[It is interesting to see that John Ayto cites Roger’s Profanisaurus Rex amongst his sources of authentic persuasive coinings. If you follow that link, be warned – it’s much stronger stuff.]

Drink does much better than food, rhyming slang is obviously largely the province of the male, and it often embeds itself so deeply into general linguistic usage that we are hardly conscious of it – as in porkies (porky pies) for ‘lies’, and loaf (loaf of bread) for ‘head’.

There’s a big index, so you can easily locate any term you hear but whose meaning you can’t guess (as I couldn’t with balaclava). This is an excellent and certainly bang up-to-date account of what is obviously still a thriving sub-set of English Language.

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John Ayto, Dictionary of Rhyming Slang, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp.309, ISBN: 0198607512

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Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English

July 14, 2009 by Roy Johnson

dictionary of twentieth century slang terms

This is basically a cut-down and updated version of Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English which was originally published in 1937 and is now in its eighth edition. This version contains only terms known to have arisen during the twentieth century, and 1,500 new terms have been added – many from the 1980s and 1990s. A lot of the slang terms we think of as recent actually date back as far as the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Grub dates back to the time of Oliver Cromwell, and to knock off comes from the early 18C. The editor Paul Beale has maintained Partridge’s scholarly approach by citing his sources.

This gives the reader every reason to feel confident in the definitions and authenticity of what he offers. There’s quite a lot of technical slang from various occupations, and armed forces jargon here – and not a lot of the sexual and bodily function slang you get in something like Roger’s Profanisaurus. In that sense, it’s a broader and polite companion piece to the more scurrilous collections (which are more entertaining).

There’s a huge bibliography of printed sources, and a rather interesting appendix which gives notes on special sub-sets of slang, ranging from bird-watchers to tiddlywinks players, and from backslang to Spanglish and Tombola. It also includes slang from public schools, jazz idioms, and an amazing list of railwaymen’s slang and nicknames.

A typical entry gives the flavour and an idea of the scholarly approach:

floater. A mistake, a faux pas; a moment of embarrassment; university s. (circa 1910), by 1929 (Wodehouse), gen, to the upper and middle classes. Lunn, 1913; Knox, 1934, ‘It produced…in the original and highly esoteric sense of that term, a “floater”.’ Perhaps because it cannot be recalled, though perhaps suggested by faux pas slurred to föper; cf., however, float, v.,2.—2. Esp. in floaters and mash, sausages and mashed potatoes: RAF: since circa 1920.—4. A meat pie in a plate of peas or gravy: Aus.:later C.20. Wilkes.—See:-

floaters. Spots before the eyes: since circa. 1950 or a decade earlier . (Weekend 21 May, 1969.) Also known as flying flies.

Pinning down slang in print is never going to be easy, but having a cheap and accessible version of a classic resource available is very reassuring. Eric Partridge was an independent, a radical, and a one-off – and his publications are well worth keeping alive.

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Paul Beale (ed), Concise Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, London: Routledge, 1999, pp.534, ISBN: 0415063523

Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms

August 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

lists of words, their alternatives, and their opposites

This Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms should appeal to a number of different users — editors, poets, crossword fans, and word puzzle solvers in general. It’s an easy-to-use source of over 150,000 alternative and opposite words to improve your wordpower and communication skills, and make your English more interesting and original. In fact it’s two books in one, because the dictionary is followed by a huge lexicon of what are termed ‘hard words’.

These are unusual and obscure words you might wish to use in unusual circumstances, running from abattis (a defence made of felled trees with the boughs pointing outwards) to zymurgy (the branch of applied chemistry dealing with the use of fermentation in brewing). The main part of the book offers each headword entry followed by synonyms which are listed alphabetically, and antonyms are placed at the end of entries where appropriate. There are examples to show how words of less obvious senses are used, and markers such as ‘informal’, ‘derogatory’, and ‘obsolete’ highlight the usage style.

For instance, let’s say you wanted to avoid repeating the word hard in a piece of writing. You look up the word and choose from a list of alternatives – and they are arranged in groups according to the sense in which the word is being used:

hard adj 1 adamantine, compact, compressed, dense, firm, flinty, frozen, hardened, impenetrable, impervious, inflexible, rigid, rocky, solid, solidified, steely, stiff, stony, unbreakable, unyielding. 2 hard labour. arduous, back-breaking, exhausting, fatiguing, formidable, gruelling, harsh, heavy, laborious, onerous, rigorous, severe, stiff, strenuous, taxing, tiring, tough, uphill, wearying. 3 a hard problem. baffling, complex, complicated, confusing, difficult, enigmatic, insoluble, intricate, involved, knotty, perplexing, puzzling, tangled, inf thorny. 4 a hard heart. callous, cold, cruel inf hard-boiled, hard-hearted, harsh, heartless, hostile, inflexible, intolerant, merciless, obdurate, pitiless, ruthless, severe, stern, strict, unbending, unfeeling, unfriendly, unkind. 5 a hard blow. forceful, heavy, powerful, strong, violent. 6 hard times. austere, bad, calamitous, disagreeable, distressing, grim, intolerable, painful, unhappy, unpleasant. 7 a hard worker. assiduous, conscientious, devoted, indefatigable, industrious, keen, persistent, unflagging, untiring, zealous. Opp EASY, SOFT. hard-headed > BUSINESSLIKE. hard-hearted > CRUEL. hard up > POOR. hard-wearing > DURABLE.

It has to be said that the synonyms fare better than the antonyms, and of course there are plenty of terms for which there are no antonyms – bicycle for instance. Plenty of synonyms – bike, cycle, two-wheeler – and so on, but no anti-bicycle.

This could also be very useful for crossword addicts in solving those clues which are posed in finding one word which means the same as another – as in ‘adamantine (4)’ = hard.

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Alan Spooner (ed), Oxford Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edition 2007, pp.528, ISBN: 0199210659

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Dictionary of the Internet

July 29, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Internet jargon and IT technical terms explained

Do you know what a ‘dongle’, a ‘sandbox’, and a ‘Ponzi scheme’ are? The Internet and its technology is expanding at such a blistering rate, that it’s difficult to keep up. Sometimes it’s even hard to understand the terms in which it’s all described. This Dictionary of the Internet explains the thousands of new terms which have come into use during the last few years. This includes the abbreviations of the newsgroups, the language of e-commerce, and the scientific terms used to describe the technical and organisational structure of the Internet.

It provides terms on the Web itself, software technology, security, and the arcane language of hackers, whitehats, and alpha geeks. It gains its strength from concentrating in depth on the Internet and its infrastructure, rather than on general computing terms. Entries run from ‘above the fold’ – an expression taken from the newspaper industry which is now applied to Web design – to ‘Z order’ – the sequence in which layers are added to a graphic or a Web page.

In between, there’s a useful and very entertaining mixture of the language of bleeding edge technology [yes, that’s in] as well as the slang, vogue terms, and prolific coinings of newsgroups. Darrell Ince’s explanations are so thorough that some of them are like mini-tutorials. I read them through from first entry to last and learned something interesting on almost every page.

The book is issued with a CD which contains the full dictionary entries in a browsable format, with hyperlinks. There are also links to relevant websites. The dictionary is supported by a separate web site where updates for downloading are posted. This is a wonderfully rich compendium – as smack up to date as it’s possible to be.

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Darrel Ince, Dictionary of the Internet, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp.340, ISBN: 019280460X

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Eats, Shoots and Leaves

October 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a radical defense of traditional punctuation rules

Who would have thought it! A book on punctuation at the top of the best-seller lists. The title refers to joke about a panda who goes into a cafe, orders a sandwich, then pulls out a gun and fires it. The panda had read an encyclopedia entry on itself which contained the unnecessary comma in Eats, Shoots and Leaves. Lynn Truss’s attitude to punctuation is enthusiastic, robust, and uncompromising, as her subtitle makes clear.

She wants you to become angry at the misuse of apostrophes and indignant at misplaced commas. She teaches via anecdote, which is probably why the book is so popular. There are no stuffy grammar lessons here, just accounts of bad punctuation, explanations of why they are wrong, and exhortations to keep up standards.

She likens punctuation to good manners – something which should be almost invisible, but which eases the way for readers. And in fact for all her slightly tongue-in-cheek militancy, she takes a non-pedantic line where there are areas of doubt or where punctuation becomes a matter of taste and style.

She takes you on a lively and entertaining tour of the comma, the semicolon, the apostrophe, the colon, and the full stop. Then it’s on to the piquancies of the exclamation and the question mark.

There are several interesting but mercifully brief detours into the history of punctuation – and I couldn’t help smiling when she confessed that her admiration for Aldus Manutius the elder (1450-1515) ran to being prepared to have his children.

Her style is very amusing and, appropriately enough for a book on language, quite linguistically inventive. She knows how to get close to you as a reader and isn’t scared to take risks.

For all her vigilance however, I think she misunderstands one example of the apostrophe – and the point of the joke it is making. A cartoon showing a building with the sign Illiterate’s Entrance could be using the term ‘illiterate’ as a collective singular. She thinks it should read Illiterates’. But we won’t quibble.

She ends by looking at the chaos of random punctuation which now predominates much of email messaging – and feels apprehensive. But I don’t think she needs to worry. For every hyphen or ellipsis to punctuate a gap in thought and sense, there is a new word or a new linguistic invention to compensate. Language may well be a self-compensating and even self-correcting system after all.

Anyone who is unsure about the basics of punctuation will learn some valuable lessons here, and those who already care will have their feelings and understanding confirmed in a very entertaining manner.

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Lynn Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, London: Profile Books, 2009, pp.209, ISBN: 0007329067

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Effective Writing and Speaking

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

skills for speaking, writing, and presenting

John Seely is something of a specialist in writing guides to clear, efficient communication skills. This is one of a number of books he has published with Oxford University Press, and it’s a much-expanded version of his earlier Oxford Guide to Writing and Speaking. It covers how to structure a business letter and how to strike the right tone; how to format and follow the protocols of emailing; how to write a persuasive curriculum vitae, structure a job application, and prepare for the interview; how to prepare and deliver a PowerPoint presentation; how to organise and write a report; and how to prepare a press release when dealing with the media. Each chapter follows the same structure.

First there’s a summary of its main points; then the guidance is spelled out in short, clear paragraphs and bulleted lists. There are occasional self-assessment exercises; and then comes a numbered list of general guidance notes on the topic. After form, he deals withe the next two important features of efficient communication – audience and context. This involves adjusting your language and tone to suit your readership, plus keeping your subject and your purpose in mind. He also shows you how the same piece of information can be transmitted in a number of different ways.

The next part of the book focuses on the basics of English language – its vocabulary, spelling, grammar, punctuation, and even how it is spoken.

In the final section of the book he deals with writing as a process. This starts from the generation of ideas, goes through planning and writing drafts, then shows you how to revise and edit what you produce. The most valuable lesson which many people can learn is that writing is a process, not something you do at one pass.

If you want something shorter or pitched at a simpler level, try his other books on the same subject — Words, Writing Reports, or The A—Z of Grammar & Punctuation. This one will give you everything you need for everyday practical communication skills.

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John Seely, Oxford Guide to Effective Writing and Speaking, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.310. ISBN: 0192806130

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Encyclopedia Britannica on CD-ROM

May 31, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the world’s largest print encyclopedia – on one DVD

Just imagine – people used to take out long-term loans to buy the multi-volume printed edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. Now it’s available on CD for the price of a single book. That’s the revolution in digital technology for you — and a lesson in eCommerce. Britannica started in the mid-18th century and went on to become the world’s most famous encyclopaedia. The latest CD version includes all the material from the 32-volume print edition, and there’s more too. They have also added the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and a world atlas packed with statistics and facts.

Other outstanding features are audio and video clips, natural language searching, and a series of topic tours – showing you superb multimedia presentations of chosen topics — from Aviation to Wildlife. There are 100,000 articles and entries on practically everything you could imagine — all of them authoritative, and some written by distinguished scientists and authors, such as Albert Einstein and Robert Louis Stevenson. On top of this impressive library of data, there are 12,000 photos and maps, timelines on science, ecology, medicine, music and literature; plus 125,000 active hyperlinks to resources on the Internet you can trust.

The materials add up to a hefty 2 GB over three CDs, and there are two options for using them. You can install the whole thing onto your hard disk. Alternatively, you can run a partial install, which is much lighter on resources, but requires disk-swapping during use. You can also update the materials – which is a big bonus.

Britannica is designed like a Web site, with a homepage which is always within reach. There are three ways of accessing information. You can Search, or use an A-to-Z feature, or Knowledge Navigator. You can also search once, then click between the results on all three of these interfaces.

It also has a facility that allows you to compare data between nations and create instant reports, graphs and tables for research or homework. As well as bookmarks, you can take notes on a particular item, or collate and lay out your collections in an attractive, publishable format.

The latest 2010 de lux edition is actually three encyclopaedias in one: Encyclopaedia Britannica Library, Britannica Student Library and Britannica Children’s Library. Our parents and grandparents would hardly have believed it. In terms of the sheer volume of information, this really is a stunning bargain.

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Encyclopedia Britannica on CD-ROM, updated annualy.

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English Slang

November 21, 2012 by Roy Johnson

the inventiveness of everyday language

In this fairly hefty study of English slang (‘the people’s poetry’ as he calls it) Michael Adams is trying to bridge the gap between an academic study of linguistics and a populist approach to slang that merely lists recent coinages and their explanations or folk etymologies. He’s trying to make clear distinctions between slang, jargon, colloquial, cant, argot, and merely informal expressions – all of which tend to overlap and bleed into each other.

It’s not easy, because a word can belong to more than one category, depending on who is using it and the context in which it is being used. People often use both slang and jargon at the same time – and make little distinction between the two linguistic categories. Moreover the meaning of a slang expression may change over time (like any other item of language) and whilst a great deal of slang has a short lifespan, it does not necessarily disappear entirely.

His most serious argument is that slang is not a ‘low vulgar, unmeaning language’ – as it is defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Adams claims it is a form of poetry that adds vivacity and pungency to our communication – hence his observation that it is ‘the poetry of everyday life’.

After questions of definition he moves on to consider how it is actually used – in other words, a socio-linguistic approach to the subject. He puts an enormous amount of emphasis on African American slang, almost giving the impression that other groups do not generate slang of their own.

I was interested to note that he skirts round the contentious issue of ‘Ebonics’, but he looks in some detail at the issue of slang and gender. Yes, women do use slang as much as men – particularly if you take into account the use of conversational tags such as innit and thingy.

I’m afraid that this also leads into an extended consideration of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other television shows, where he talks about Buffy and Homer Simpson as if they were real living Americans. He doesn’t seem to take into account that much of the linguistic inventiveness of these characters is the product of largely white middle-class script writers – though it has to be said for their inventiveness that some of the terms they create do pass into everyday use by ordinary human beings.

There’s a whole chapter devoted to the aesthetics of slang, including a scholarly analysis of rhetorical devices such as tmesis (infixing, as in absofuckinglutely) and diacope (as in shut the fuck up) But the problem is that he unpicks his illustrative examples in exhausting detail and then repeats his explanations and bon mots until they are drained of value.

Michael Adams is obviously very knowledgeable on the subject, but I suspect that his approach might be too scholarly for the average reader and not scholarly enough for specialists. But the book got rave reviews when it first appeared in America, so so there’s no reason it won’t do well in the UK.

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Michael Adams, Slang: The People’s Poetry, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.238, ISBN: 0199913773

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Language

dictionaries, grammar, spelling, language use, and slang

explanations, history, and origin of proverbial sayings

memorable sayings by the clever and famous

rhyming slang explained and brought up to date

dictionary of twentieth century slang terms

lists of words, their alternatives, and their opposites

Internet jargon and IT technical terms explained

a radical defense of traditional punctuation rules

skills for speaking, writing, and presenting

the world’s largest print encyclopedia – on one DVD

the inventiveness of everyday language

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