Buttering Parsnips, Twocking Chavs The Secret Life of the English Language

by Manser, Martin H.; Pickering, David

• ISBN13: 9780304368150
• ISBN10: 0304368156
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-10-01
• Publisher: Cassell

Summary

Within the rambling house of words and language we all too often expect to find doors with forbidding-sounding signs on them: 'Spelling', 'Grammar', 'Syntax', 'Etymology', 'Phonetics' and the like - signs that discourage rather than invite entry. But behind these heavy doors the house of words and language is a place of delight and curiosity: on closer inspection its shelves are revealed to be groaning not with dry and dusty tomes exhorting correctness of grammar and usage but with more toothsome reading-matter: intriguing tales of unexpected word and phrase origins; light-hearted explorations of the pleasures of wordplay; listings of lexical peculiarities, from 'ghost letters' to words that have no rhymes; and accounts and examples of the myriad types of English, from slang to jargon, and from gobbledegook to text messaging.Curious and Extraordinary Words is a guided tour of the English language, presented in the form of a browsable miscellany of words and phrases. It is arranged in 'seven ages' (chapters), tracing the 'birth' of words (alphabets, word origins, etc.), their youthful playfulness and occasional misdemeanours (word games, misspellings, etc.) and various other stages of language 'life', culminating in death (last words, lost words, etc.) and reincarnation (words that have changed their meaning). Within each of these chapters clusters of loosely related material are presented in a range of different forms - lists, boxes, small passages of narrative text. The text is liberally dotted with amusing and apposite quotations, amazing facts and other nuggets.

Table of Contents

Birth: In the Beginning was the Word

Childhood: Poultry, Prunes and Prisms

Youth: Words Go to School

Adulthood: The Working Life of Words

Middle Age: The Social Life of Words

Old Age: Lost for Words

Death and Rebirth: Last and Lost Words

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