Hardcore Dictionaries
Ammon Shea wonders what makes a dictionary “hardcore”.
A Celebration of Making Old “Make” New
Ammon Shea looks at the word “make.”
BEA Dispatch
Purdy, Director of Publicity, is in LA this weekend at Book Expo America. He will be reporting from the action for those of us left in NYC. Live from the convention floor of BEA in LA. For those not in the know BEA stands for Book Expo America, the largest convention of publishers, media, bookstore […]
Waiting for Petrichor
Ammon Shea, an expert dictionary reader, reflects on rain.
Words Out of Context
Ammon Shea explains an alternative use for dictionaries.
Bloomberg and “Maintain”
Ammon, an expert dictionary reader, ponders Mayor Bloomberg’s dislike of the word “maintain”.
Samuel Johnson and the First English Dictionary
Ammon Shea wonders who wrote the first English dictionary.
Linguistic Pet Peeves:
Or, I’d Rather Be Napping
Ammon Shea shares a pet peeve.
How Dictionaries Ruined My Scrabble Game
Ammon Shea explains how dictionaries ruined his Scrabble game.
What Every beginning Dictionary Reader Should Know
Ammon Shea shares some advice for beginning dictionary readers.
Your cheatin’ words
Ammon Shea explores cheating in the OED.
Flunkeys and lackeys two centuries ago
In An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology, I called William L. Blackley’s 1869 book Word Gossip singularly uninformative, and I am sorry for that remark.
In full swing
I received a letter with a question about the etymology of swag “booty; cockiness, etc.” The reader complained that dictionaries have nothing to say about the origin of this word. She is quite right.
The four-letter word lust
Years ago, I wrote about our four-letter words, and the comments were, as could be expected, numerous. Incidentally, the origin of those words is nether too interesting nor (in at least one case) too complicated. Lust is not l*** or l**t, and one can speak about it, without hurting anyone’s sensibilities.
The once unpronounceable word “bloody”
It is almost certain that the main event in the reception in England of the formerly unpronounceable “low” word bloody (which first turned up in texts in 1540 and, consequently, existed in colloquial speech earlier) goes back to 1914, when Eliza Dolittle, the heroine of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, uttered it from the stage. Nowadays, when in “public discourse,” the rich hoard of English adjectives has been reduced to the single F-word (at least so in the US), this purism of an age gone by cannot but amuse us.
Westward Ho
The blog Oxford Etymologist is resuming its activities. I expected multiple expressions of grief and anxiety at the announcement that I would be away from my desk for a week, but no one seems to have noticed. Anyway, I am back and ready to finish the series on the four cardinal points. Since it is in the west that the sun sets, I relegated this post to the end of my long story.