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Dictionary of Modern Quotations

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famous quotes, sayings, film lines, slogans, catchphrases

The Dictionary of Modern Quotations is a collection of quotes which offers a vivid picture both of the world today, and of the landmark events and key voices leading up to it. From Scott’s Antarctic Expedition in 1912 to the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001, it charts watersheds such as two World Wars, as well as the ebbs and flows of popular culture. The new second edition now also includes Soundbites of 2002-3.

Dictionary of Modern Quotations It contains more than five thousand quotations from authors as diverse as Elizabeth Arden, Billy Connolly, Bertolt Brecht, Linda Evangelista, Eddie Izzard, Alison Lurie, Carl Sagan, William Shatner, and Desmond Tutu. The dictionary is author-organized with generous cross-referencing and indexed by both keywords and themes.

This latest edition also contains new categories for film taglines and cartoon captions which have been added to accompany misquotations. It is designed to answer the questions, ‘Who said that…and when…and why?’ And to tell the truth, is also answers questions such as ‘Did he really say that!?

My favourites are still wisecracks from the likes of Woody Allen:

If only God would give me some clear sign. Like making a large deposit in my name in a Swiss bank.

or Grouch Marx, earlier in the same tradition:

I’ve been around so long, I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.

Some entries make you want to read more – as in the case of the now almost forgotten Hilaire Belloc:

I’m tired of Love: I’m still more tired of Rhyme.
But money gives me pleasure all the time.

Or this from James Elroy Flecker, an English poet whose name I had not come across before:

I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep
Beyond the village which men still call Tyre,
With leaden age o’ercargoed, dipping deep
For Famagusta and the hidden sun
That rings black Cyprus with a lake of fire.

OK, it has a ring of John Masefield’s Cargoes about it, but it tweaked my appetite for more.

Some of the entries now seem amazingly prescient, such as the remark made by Albert Einstein in 1931:

I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.

and even more so, this from French general Foch on the Treaty of Versailles in 1919:

This is not a peace treaty, it is an armistice for twenty years.

Spot on, general.

This latest updated edition now also includes famous soundbites as well as memorable quotes from the famous (and infamous); it also includes advertising slogans, catchphrases, lines from films, misquotations, newspaper headlines, and political sayings.

If you like these anthologies, either as a serious reference or a rich source of pleasant browsing, this is a good example of its kind.

© Roy Johnson 2008

Dictionary of Modern Quotations   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Elizabeth Knowles (ed) Dictionary of Modern Quotations, 3rd edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp.496, ISBN: 0199547467

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Dictionary of Modern Slang

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street-speak, vulgar language, swearing and obscenities

As the editors say in their introduction to this latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang, ‘A year, to paraphrase Harold Wilson, is a long time in slang’. In fact the principal difficulty in compiling lexical resources of this type is what to leave out – because a great deal of slang is very evanescent. Oxford University Press have the advantage of compiling their dictionaries from the huge ‘Corpus’ of recorded language use which makes up the data base from which their publications are compiled. This is a collection of examples of how the English language is actually being used, drawn from the printed word – from literary novels and specialist journals to everyday newspapers and magazines, and from Hansard to the language of chatrooms, emails, and weblogs. The database contains over two billion words, and expands at the rate of 350 million words a year.

Dictionary of Modern SlangSo this assembly of what’s current has a better chance than most of being directly relevant – though you should remember that in order to qualify for inclusion in a dictionary, words have to be written down, not simply spoken. OUP also stipulate that they have to remain there for some time before they are considered for inclusion in dictionaries

The entries of this compilation run from abso-bloody-lutely and Acapulco gold via manky and meeja to wuss, yuckie, and zonker. As you can perhaps detect from this random selection, it’s rather polite in tone. There’s little of the ribaldry of Roger’s Profanisaurus or the scholarly rigour of Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English

There are lots of very dated references such as Ally-Pally (BBC) and Andrew (the navy) which I seriously doubt are in general circulation now – except with people over retirement age. But I was glad to see that it includes rhyming slang, as well as street language from other English-speaking cultures such as America and Australia, so the book could be useful if you’re thinking of emigrating.

There are also some linguistic curios in the form of words for which the etymology is simply not known – such as eighty-six (to refuse to serve someone in a restaurant) and others which just seem genuinely unusual and very entertaining – such as copacetic (outstanding) and gamahuche (cunnilingus or fellatio).

There is a certain respect given to lewd slang. The editors don’t balk at including carpet-muncher and mantee, but these entries are noticeably brief, and ladies in sensible shoes doesn’t get listed. They offer bristols and boobs, but not headlamps or hooters. I also looked in vain for the expressive rack, the amusingly faux-naive front-bottom, and the very well known Ugandan discussions. Entries on some less contentious issues are almost embarrassingly passé – such as goggle box (television) and knuckle sandwich (a punch).

There’s also a thematic index – because many of the terms are drawn from the worlds of drugs, sport, youth culture, and television, as well as traditional slang topics such as sex, money, and bodily functions. I always think that compilations of this kind are quire good fun, but all in all, there’s not much here that your maiden aunt could object to.

Dictionary of Modern Slang   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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© Roy Johnson 2010

John Ayto and John Simpson, Dictionary of Modern Slang, Oxford: Oxford University Press, (second edition) 2010, pp.408, ISBN: 0199232059

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Dictionary of Nicknames

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private names for the notorious, famous, and infamous

This specialist Dictionary of Nicknames offers a collection of names associated with historical figures, politicians, sports stars, actors, entertainers, organizations, and places. It also includes nicknames which have become so famous they have eclipsed the real name of the original – such as Botticelli, Tintoretto, and El Greco. A well-coined nickname is supposed to summarise an individual’s reputation, personality, or principal characteristic. And if it’s good, or funny, it will stick.

Dictionary of Nicknames For instance when the ferocious, right-wing, black-haired, English MP Anne Widdecome was lecturing the Labour government from her position in the shadow cabinet, she was given the rather unflattering nickname of Doris Karloff. It stuck, because it seemed so appropriate – even though she is now an Alice-band wearing blonde. And when she said in her turn of her boss Michael Howard, that he ‘had something of the night about him’, it helped to nail his reputation as a political vampire.

Some of the potted biographies which accompany the entries are quite revealing – such as that on America’s Sweetheart (Mary Pickford) who was not only a star but became an astute businesswoman who founded the production company United Artists with Charlie Chaplin, D.W.Griffiths, and her husband Douglas Fairbanks.

Nicknames can be affectionate, approbatory, respectful, scornful, scurrilous, derogatory, or even vitriolic. Some of those listed here are also pretty lame, such as The Blind Poet for John Milton. Others are quite cruel, such as The Great Whore for Anne Boleyn – so named because she failed to produce an heir for Henry VIII, and was alleged to have many lovers.

It’s a dictionary full of pop and media trivia – such as the fact that Bing Crosby got his nickname from reading a comic called The Bingville Bugle which featured a character called Bingo, a boy with large floppy ears.

I think it was a mistake to exclude generic nicknames such as Chalky White and Dusty Miller, because these are of interest. But as compensation, there’s a special appendix of football club nicknames, British army regiments, and US state names.

© Roy Johnson 2006

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Andrew Delahunty, Oxford Dictionary of Nicknames, Oxford: Oxford University Press, new edition 2006, ISBN: 0198609485

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Dictionary of Phrase and Fable

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explanations, origins, and definitions

This Dictionary of Phrase and Fable is a paperback cut-down version of the complete Oxford Dictionary of Phrase & Fable. It contains over 10,000 phrases, sayings, and allusions – including single words and names that crop up in cultural references – and offers a brief explanation of their meanings and origins. It also includes terms from the classical world of Greece and Rome, as well as other mythologies and religious beliefs – including folk customs, superstitions, and other forms of popular beliefs, as well as factual history and common record.

Dictionary of Phrase and Fable So, there are potted biographies of St Lawrence, the Christian martyr, as well as Lazarus, the man who rather miraculously rose from the dead. Ulysses sits fairly closely alongside the Unnabomber – which suggests to me that this book would be a fairly useful resource for crossword puzzlers and participants in my local pub quiz. Entries run from Aaron and abacus to Zoroastrianism, Zorro, and Zwinglian – respectively a monotheistic pre-Islamic religion, a Californian-Spanish Robin Hood, and a supporter of the sixteenth century Swiss protestant reformer.

There are also up-to-date entries on historic events such as 9/11 and tsunami, and I was glad to see that dodgy dossier was included – so that it will hang as long as possible like an albatross around Tony Blair’s neck where it belongs.

Commonly used words which occur in a number of expressions are given their own sub-categories – as follows:

milk
milk for babies something easy and pleasant to learn; especially in allusion to 1 Corinthians 3:2 and Hebrews 5:12, contrasted with ‘strong meat’ (see > STRONG).
the milk in the coconut a puzzling fact or circumstance, the crux of something (informal, first recorded in the US in the mid 19th century).
milk of human kindness compassion, sympathy; originally from Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606), in Lady Macbeth’s expression of her anxiety that her husband lacked the necessary ruthlessness to kill King Duncan and seize the throne.
mother’s milk in figurative usage, something providing sustenance or regarded by a person as entirely appropriate to them.
See also > why buy a COW when milk is so cheap? it is no use crying over spilt milk at > CRY, land of milk and honey at
> LAND2

It includes fictional characters such as Anna Karenina, historic events such as the name of the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (Enola Gay), obscure terms such as oxymoron and palimpsest, and important figures such as Hindenburg and Rasputin, as well as the possible origins of expressions such as backing into the limelight, and even the fashionable jumping the shark.

This is a serious modern contender challenging the longstanding supremacy of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable – a book of which it is said nobody would find of any use, but which has been in print for over 150 years, because it is so eccentric and funny.

© Roy Johnson 2006

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Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2nd edn) 2006, pp.805, ISBN: 019920246X

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Dictionary of Political Quotations

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who said what on history, government, and war

Editor Anthony Jay argues that there is a solid core of political wisdom in his Dictionary of Political Quotations which runs from Aeschylus to the not-so-classic George Dubya Bush. But this huge compilation also includes occasional witticisms and put-downs which say more about the speaker than the subject – such as Churchill’s description of Clement Atlee as A modest man who has much to be modest about.

Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations The latest edition of this work has also been brought up to date with what are called Soundbites, including such gems as John Prescott on the issuing of identity cards:

Entitlement cards will not be compulsory, but everyone will have to have one

On bureaucracy in his own country, the Italian politician Antonio Martino observes:

In Milan, traffic lights are instructions. In Rome, they are suggestions. In Naples, they are Christmas decorations.

Entries are listed alphabetically by author, from Diane Abbott [UK MP] to Emile Zola – who has one of the shortest contributions: J’accuse. The sequence is punctuated by the inclusion of special categories including political slogans, mottoes, epitaphs, famous last words, newspaper headlines, and misquotations.

Every effort is made to give the accurate source – and in fact there is a running column down the right-hand side of the page supplying all the details, including false attributions which have stuck.

Churchill, Disraeli, Jefferson, and Lincoln get the lion’s share of space, with Burke, Bagehot, and Shakespeare close runners up. Since the examples for each individual are arranged in chronological order, reading Churchill’s is rather like watching a speeded-up film of his rise and fall as a politician.

It’s a browser’s treasure trove. Entries run from the grim realism of Oliver Cromwell’s describing the execution of Charles I as Cruel necessity, to Woody Allen’s I believe there is something out there watching over us – Unfortunately it’s the government, or the anonymous lady in the Savoy hotel: But this is terrible —they’ve elected a Labour Government, and the country will never stand for that.

It’s not a book you can read continuously. I tried it, and after a few pages, even the most trenchant remarks all seem to merge into a bland porridge. But then just occasionally something completely absurd jumps off the page – such as Ronald Reagan’s anti-abortion argument: I’ve noticed that everybody who is for abortion has already been born. You couldn’t make it up, could you?

© Roy Johnson 2007

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Anthony Jay (ed) The Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3rd edition, 2007, pp.560, ISBN: 0198610610

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Dictionary of Proverbs

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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.

Oxford Dictionary of ProverbsThe 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.

© Roy Johnson 2008

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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

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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.

Dictionary of Quotations by Subject 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.

© Roy Johnson 2006

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

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Dictionary of Rhyming Slang

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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.

Dictionary of Rhyming SlangIf 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.

© Roy Johnson 2003

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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 Synonyms and Antonyms

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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’.

Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms 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.

© Roy Johnson 2007

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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

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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.

Dictionary 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.

© Roy Johnson 2003

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

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