Download or read book Strange to Say Etymology as Serious Entertainment written by Deborah Warren and published by Paul Dry Books. This book was released on 2021-08-30 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “You can’t stop language, because when all’s said and done is never.” In her witty account of the origins of many English words and expressions, Deborah Warren educates as she entertains―and entertain she does, leading her readers through the amazing labyrinthian history of related words. “Language,” she writes, “is all about mutation.” Read here about the first meanings of common words and phrases, including dessert, vodka, lunatic, tulip, dollar, bikini, peeping tom, peter out, and devil’s advocate. A former Latin teacher, Warren is a gifted poet and a writer of great playfulness. Strange to Say is a cornucopia of joyful learning and laughter. Did you know… Lord Cardigan was a British aristocrat and military man known for the sweater jackets he sported. A lying lawyer might pull the wool over a judge’s eyes―yank his wig down across his face. In the original tale of Cinderella, her slippers were made of vair (“fur”)―which in the orally-told story mistakenly turned into the homonym verre (“glass”). Like laundry, lavender evolved from Italian lavanderia, “things to be washed.” The plant was used as a clothes freshener. It smells better than, say, the misspelled Downy Unstopable with the ad that touts its “feisty freshness,” unaware that feisty evolved from Middle English fisten―fart.
Download or read book Famous Freaks written by Deborah Warren and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2024-03-05 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did you know Thomas Edison proposed to his wife in Morse code? Or that the CIA considered covering Castro’s shoes in thallium to get rid of his iconic beard? The strange facts and foibles of history’s famous figures are divulged in Famous Freaks. The book is a fun, bite sized compendium of the weird and unbelievable. Big names—small disclosures. Important historical data—little to none. This book can be picked up and read anywhere, from any starting point. Skim a section or just peruse a page, but you may find yourself hooked after reading a few of the hilariously strange entries inside. Deborah Warren, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, deals out the strange facts of history’s famous with a poetic style and a sense of humor. The collected details, those which history might rather have forgotten, are given their place in the spotlight. Start from the front, but if it’s not your thing, flip around the pages. There are plenty of Famous Freaks inside.
Download or read book Outer Space 100 Poems written by Midge Goldberg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-29 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across time and cultures, poets and astronomers have often asked the same questions about outer space, and about ourselves.
Download or read book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue written by John McWhorter and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-10-27 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A survey of the quirks and quandaries of the English language, focusing on our strange and wonderful grammar Why do we say “I am reading a catalog” instead of “I read a catalog”? Why do we say “do” at all? Is the way we speak a reflection of our cultural values? Delving into these provocative topics and more, Our Magnificent Bastard Language distills hundreds of years of fascinating lore into one lively history. Covering such turning points as the little-known Celtic and Welsh influences on English, the impact of the Viking raids and the Norman Conquest, and the Germanic invasions that started it all during the fifth century ad, John McWhorter narrates this colorful evolution with vigor. Drawing on revolutionary genetic and linguistic research as well as a cache of remarkable trivia about the origins of English words and syntax patterns, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue ultimately demonstrates the arbitrary, maddening nature of English— and its ironic simplicity due to its role as a streamlined lingua franca during the early formation of Britain. This is the book that language aficionados worldwide have been waiting for (and no, it’s not a sin to end a sentence with a preposition).
Download or read book Strange Bedfellows Vol C written by Anil and published by Strategic Book Publishing & Rights Agency. This book was released on 2020-06-12 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As in the first volume of Strange Bedfellows, etymologically related words, most surprisingly so (strange bedfellows), are used to construct amusing and/or amazing pairs, phrases, whole sentences, essays and nonsense stories. Most are accompanied by silly comments, tall tales with recurring characters, poems, fake news and ads. A larger dose of satire than in vol.1 is also included, with a number of Trump send-ups. Again there is a large appendix citing many other etymological surprises.
Download or read book What in the Word written by Charles Harrington Elster and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2005 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a humorous look at the English language, including information on word and phrase origins, slang, style, usage, punctuation, and pronunciation.
Download or read book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind written by Julian Jaynes and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2000-08-15 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
Download or read book Connoisseurs of Worms written by Deborah Warren and published by Paul Dry Books. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these poems, the always-original Deborah Warren enchants the ear and dazzles the eye of the imagination.
Download or read book Utopia written by Thomas More and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2023-12-03 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia is a work of fiction and socio-political satire by Thomas More published in 1516 in Latin. The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. Many aspects of More's description of Utopia are reminiscent of life in monasteries.
Download or read book The Etymologicon written by Mark Forsyth and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This perfect gift for readers, writers, and literature majors alike unearths the quirks of the English language. For example, do you know why a mortgage is literally a “death pledge”? Why guns have girls’ names? Why “salt” is related to “soldier”? Discover the answers to all of these etymological questions and more in this fascinating book for fans of of Eats, Shoots & Leaves. The Etymologicon is a completely unauthorized guide to the strange underpinnings of the English language. It explains how you get from “gruntled” to “disgruntled”; why you are absolutely right to believe that your meager salary barely covers “money for salt”; how the biggest chain of coffee shops in the world connects to whaling in Nantucket; and what, precisely, the Rolling Stones have to do with gardening. This witty book will awake the linguist in you and illuminate the hidden meanings behind common words and phrases, tracing their evolution through all of their surprising paths throughout history.
Download or read book Zero Meridian written by Deborah Warren and published by Ivan R. Dee Publisher. This book was released on 2004 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ms Warren's poems combine imagination with intelligence, music with emotional energy. The language sparkles in poem after poem.--Dana Warren
Download or read book The Alex Crow written by Andrew Smith and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-03-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Andrew Smith is the Kurt Vonnegut of YA . . . [Smith’s novels] are the freshest, richest, and weirdest books to hit the YA world in years.” —Entertainment Weekly Skillfully blending multiple story strands that transcend time and place, award-winning Grasshopper Jungle author Andrew Smith chronicles the story of Ariel, a refugee who is the sole survivor of an attack on his small village. Now living with an adoptive family in Sunday, West Virginia, Ariel's story is juxtaposed against those of a schizophrenic bomber and the diaries of a failed arctic expedition from the late nineteenth century . . . and a depressed, bionic reincarnated crow.
Download or read book True Story written by Danielle J. Lindemann, PhD and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Best Nonfiction Book of 2022 by Esquire A sociological study of reality TV that explores its rise as a culture-dominating medium—and what the genre reveals about our attitudes toward race, gender, class, and sexuality What do we see when we watch reality television? In True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us, the sociologist and TV-lover Danielle J. Lindemann takes a long, hard look in the “funhouse mirror” of this genre. From the first episodes of The Real World to countless rose ceremonies to the White House, reality TV has not just remade our entertainment and cultural landscape (which it undeniably has). Reality TV, Lindemann argues, uniquely reflects our everyday experiences and social topography back to us. Applying scholarly research—including studies of inequality, culture, and deviance—to specific shows, Lindemann layers sharp insights with social theory, humor, pop cultural references, and anecdotes from her own life to show us who we really are. By taking reality TV seriously, True Story argues, we can better understand key institutions (like families, schools, and prisons) and broad social constructs (such as gender, race, class, and sexuality). From The Bachelor to Real Housewives to COPS and more (so much more!), reality programming unveils the major circuits of power that organize our lives—and the extent to which our own realities are, in fact, socially constructed. Whether we’re watching conniving Survivor contestants or three-year-old beauty queens, these “guilty pleasures” underscore how conservative our society remains, and how steadfastly we cling to our notions about who or what counts as legitimate or “real.” At once an entertaining chronicle of reality TV obsession and a pioneering work of sociology, True Story holds up a mirror to our society: the reflection may not always be pretty—but we can’t look away.
Download or read book All Strangers Are Kin written by Zora O'Neill and published by HMH. This book was released on 2016-06-14 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An American woman determined to learn the Arabic language travels to the Middle East to pursue her dream in this “witty memoir” (Us Weekly). The shadda is the key difference between a pigeon (hamam) and a bathroom (hammam). Be careful, our professor advised, that you don’t ask a waiter, ‘Excuse me, where is the pigeon?’—or, conversely, order a roasted toilet . . . If you’ve ever studied a foreign language, you know what happens when you first truly and clearly communicate with another person. As Zora O’Neill recalls, you feel like a magician. If that foreign language is Arabic, you just might feel like a wizard. They say that Arabic takes seven years to learn and a lifetime to master. O’Neill had put in her time. Steeped in grammar tomes and outdated textbooks, she faced an increasing certainty that she was not only failing to master Arabic, but also driving herself crazy. She took a decade-long hiatus, but couldn’t shake her fascination with the language or the cultures it had opened up to her. So she decided to jump back in—this time with a new approach. In this book, she takes us along on her grand tour through the Middle East, from Egypt to the United Arab Emirates to Lebanon and Morocco. She’s packed her dictionaries, her unsinkable sense of humor, and her talent for making fast friends of strangers. From quiet, bougainvillea-lined streets to the lively buzz of crowded medinas, from families’ homes to local hotspots, she brings a part of the world thousands of miles away right to your door—and reminds us that learning another tongue leaves you rich with so much more than words. “You will travel through countries and across centuries, meeting professors and poets, revolutionaries, nomads, and nerds . . . [A] warm and hilarious book.” —Annia Ciezadlo, author of Day of Honey “Her tale of her ‘Year of Speaking Arabic Badly’ is a genial and revealing pleasure.” —The Seattle Times
Download or read book Albion s Seed written by David Hackett Fischer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1991-03-14 with total page 972 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.
Download or read book The Wordhord written by Hana Videen and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-10 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An entertaining and illuminating collection of weird, wonderful, and downright baffling words from the origins of English—and what they reveal about the lives of the earliest English speakers Old English is the language you think you know until you actually hear or see it. Unlike Shakespearean English or even Chaucer’s Middle English, Old English—the language of Beowulf—defies comprehension by untrained modern readers. Used throughout much of Britain more than a thousand years ago, it is rich with words that haven’t changed (like word), others that are unrecognizable (such as neorxnawang, or paradise), and some that are mystifying even in translation (gafol-fisc, or tax-fish). In this delightful book, Hana Videen gathers a glorious trove of these gems and uses them to illuminate the lives of the earliest English speakers. We discover a world where choking on a bit of bread might prove your guilt, where fiend-ship was as likely as friendship, and where you might grow up to be a laughter-smith. The Wordhord takes readers on a journey through Old English words and customs related to practical daily activities (eating, drinking, learning, working); relationships and entertainment; health and the body, mind, and soul; the natural world (animals, plants, and weather); locations and travel (the source of some of the most evocative words in Old English); mortality, religion, and fate; and the imagination and storytelling. Each chapter ends with its own “wordhord”—a list of its Old English terms, with definitions and pronunciations. Entertaining and enlightening, The Wordhord reveals the magical roots of the language you’re reading right now: you’ll never look at—or speak—English in the same way again.
Download or read book The Word Exchange written by Alena Graedon and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dystopian novel for the digital age, The Word Exchange offers an inventive, suspenseful, and decidedly original vision of the dangers of technology and of the enduring power of the printed word. In the not-so-distant future, the forecasted “death of print” has become a reality. Bookstores, libraries, newspapers, and magazines are things of the past, and we spend our time glued to handheld devices called Memes that not only keep us in constant communication but also have become so intuitive that they hail us cabs before we leave our offices, order takeout at the first growl of a hungry stomach, and even create and sell language itself in a marketplace called the Word Exchange. Anana Johnson works with her father, Doug, at the North American Dictionary of the English Language (NADEL), where Doug is hard at work on the last edition that will ever be printed. Doug is a staunchly anti-Meme, anti-tech intellectual who fondly remembers the days when people used email (everything now is text or videoconference) to communicate—or even actually spoke to one another, for that matter. One evening, Doug disappears from the NADEL offices, leaving a single written clue: ALICE. It’s a code word he devised to signal if he ever fell into harm’s way. And thus begins Anana’s journey down the proverbial rabbit hole . . . Joined by Bart, her bookish NADEL colleague, Anana’s search for Doug will take her into dark basements and subterranean passageways; the stacks and reading rooms of the Mercantile Library; and secret meetings of the underground resistance, the Diachronic Society. As Anana penetrates the mystery of her father’s disappearance and a pandemic of decaying language called “word flu” spreads, The Word Exchange becomes a cautionary tale that is at once a technological thriller and a meditation on the high cultural costs of digital technology.
