Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms
Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms PDF download
To pay through the nose. Raining cats and dogs. By hook or by crook. Curry favor. Drink like a fish. Eat crow. We hear such phrases every day, but this book is the first truly all-encompassing etymological guide to both their meanings and origins. Spanning more than three centuries, Take My Word for It is a fascinating, one-of-a-kind window into the surprisingly short history of idioms in English. Widely known for his studies of word origins, Anatoly Liberman explains more than one thousand idioms, both popular and obscure, occurring in both American and British standard English and including many regional expressions.
The origins, and even the precise meaning, of most idioms are often obscure and lost in history. Based on a critical analysis of countless conjectures, with exact, in-depth references (rare in the literature on the subject), Take My Word for It provides not only a large corpus of idiomatic phrases but also a vast bibliography. Detailed indexes and a thesaurus make the content accessible at a glance, and Liberman’s introduction and conclusion add historical dimensions. The result of decades of research by a leading authority, this book is both instructive and absorbing for scholars and general readers, who won’t find another resource as comparable in scope or based on data even remotely as exhaustive.
This book reads like a thriller or a novel, but it is better than a thriller (the genre lauded for unstoppable action and unexpected twists) and better than a novel (called in blurbs deli-cious! riveting! gripping!), because you can open it at any page, go forward or backward, and find yourself neck-deep in a never-ending intrigue. By contrast, who rereads thrillers, even the best-selling ones?Language is the most mysterious tool we use. No one knows how it originated and at what stage a system of signals becomes language. Do bees speak? Do dolphins? Language allows us to express our thoughts, but, strangely, people do not only say things to make their intentions clear: they use phrases, as though to obfuscate a naïve listener. They leave rooms at sixes and sevens, fly off at a tangent, and “say the darndest things.” A rower will be reprimanded for catching a crab (with no crustacean in view) and end up with a flea in his ear.
Such phrases are a nightmare for an English-language learner, but you may feel like a stranger in your own land if those around you choose to box Harry, put to buck, and stand like a Stoughton bottle. Are they speaking English? Indeed they are. Today, the main forum
for satisfying our thirst for knowledge is the Internet. If, out of curiosity, you decide to search for less obscure items featured in this book, with a bit of luck you may find them: someone has perhaps come across the puzzling collocation, sent a query, and received an answer. Collectively we know a lot and hasten to enlighten one another. But when it comes to the origin of such word groups, responsible bloggers exercise great caution and prefer to sit on the fence (figura-tively speaking, to be sure).
Thanks to the labors of countless researchers, The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) can say when this or that idiom was first recorded in a printed or written text,[1] but as often as not it refrains from suggesting the origin.
In the absence of facts, guesswork cannot be intelligent and does more harm than good. Some phrases (like to sit on the fence) hardly need an elaborate etymology: the shortest decipherment and reference to the earliest known occurrence will suff-fice.
But why do we learn things by heart? And what exactly is a pretty kettle of fish, the nose of wax, and spitten image?
Format:PDF
Size:2.77 MB
Pages:336
Date:2023
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Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms PDF
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