Weeds in the garden of words : further observations on the tangled history of the English language

Bibliographic Information

Weeds in the garden of words : further observations on the tangled history of the English language

Kate Burridge

Cambridge University Press, 2005

  • : pbk
  • : hbk

Available at  / 25 libraries

Search this Book/Journal

Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. 186-190) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

If the English language is a glorious garden, filled with exotic hybrids and the continuing tradition of heritage specimens, then it is no surprise that we will also find some weeds. Linguistic weeds may have pronunciations we don't want or constructions that are out of place. We may be trying to hold on to words and usage we should perhaps have said farewell to. But as all gardeners know, what one gardener calls a 'weed', another may call a 'flower'. The same goes for words and their usage in English - sometimes we just haven't realized their virtues. Kate Burridge follows the international success of her book Blooming English with another entertaining excursion into the ever-changing nature of our complex and captivating language.

Table of Contents

  • 1. Introduction to the weedy traits of the English language
  • 2. Lexical weeds: the world of jargon, slang and euphemism
  • 3. More lexical weeds: word origins and meaning shifts
  • 4. Our grammatical weeds
  • 5. Weeds in our sounds and spelling
  • 6. The truly nasty weeds of the English language?
  • 7. W(h)ither our weeds?

by "Nielsen BookData"

Details

  • NCID
    BA7248895X
  • ISBN
    • 0521618231
    • 0521853133
  • Country Code
    uk
  • Title Language Code
    eng
  • Text Language Code
    eng
  • Place of Publication
    Cambridge
  • Pages/Volumes
    ix, 196 p.
  • Size
    22 cm
  • Subject Headings
Page Top