Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Description
“We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets.”
With wit and irreverence, lexicographer Kory Stamper cracks open the obsessive world of dictionary writing, from the...
With wit and irreverence, lexicographer Kory Stamper cracks open the obsessive world of dictionary writing, from the...
Author
Language
English
Description
"A brash, enlightening, and wildly entertaining feminist look at gendered language and the way it shapes us..."--From dust jacket, front flap.
"The word bitch conjures many images for many people, but it is most often meant to describe an unpleasant woman. Even before its usage to mean a female canine, bitch didn t refer to gender at all it originated as a gender-neutral word meaning genitalia. A perfectly innocuous word devolving into a female insult...
Author
Publisher
William Morrow
Pub. Date
2010
Language
English
Description
Goes beyond general etymology primers to counsel language enthusiasts on how to understand the pure significance of words, explaining the ways in which correct usage has a potential for enabling positive communication and more productive relationships.
Author
Language
English
Description
"The thirteen gripping tales in THE LAST SUSPICIOUS HOULDOUT deftly chronicle poignant moments in the lives of an African American community located in a "sliver of southern suburbia." Spanning from 1992 to 2007, the stories represent a period during which the Black middle class expanded, while stories of "welfare queens," "crack babies," and "superpredators" abounded in the media. Characters spotlighted in one story reappear in another, providing...
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Description
"An enlightening linguistic journey through a thousand years of feminist language - and what we can learn from the vivid vocabulary that English once had for women's bodies, experiences, and sexuality. So many of the words that we use to chronicle women's lives feel awkward or alien. Medical terms are scrupulously accurate but antiseptic. Slang and obscenities have shock value, yet they perpetuate taboos. Where are the plain, honest words for women's...
Author
Publisher
Simon & Schuster
Pub. Date
[2022]
Language
English
Description
During the pandemic, an aging screenwriter is holed up in a coastal South Carolina town with his beloved second wife, Peaches. He's been binge-eating for a year and developed a notable rapport with the local fast-food chain Hippo King. He struggles to work on a ludicrous screenplay about a Nazi attempt to kidnap FDR and, naturally, an article for Etymology Today on English words of Carthaginian origin. He thinks he has Covid. His wife thinks he is...
Author
Publisher
Random House
Pub. Date
[2021]
Language
English
Description
""Congratulations on the resurrection of your life," a colleague wrote to Emily Rapp Black when she announced the birth of her second child. The line made Emily pause. Her first child, a boy named Ronan, had died before he turned three years old from Tay-Sachs disease, an experience she wrote about in her first book, The Still Point of the Turning World. Since that time her life had changed utterly: She had left the marriage that fractured under the...
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