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Dog Days & Dandelions Martha Barnette
St Martin's Press 2003 0312280726 / 9780312280727 1st Ed New hardcover
It's a jungle out there in the dog-eat-dog world of etymology. In this zoological tour of the beastly backgrounds behind common phrases such as swan song and rare words such as snollygoster, Barnette sheds new light on both everyday and esoteric language. Whether their roots can be traced back as far as ancient Greece or only to contemporary American slang, there's a bevy of words that owe their origin to our four-footed and fine-feathered friends. Some make perfect sense, such as lousy, an infestation of lice that is, of course, a perfectly lousy thing to endure. Others are more obscure, such as comedy, which harkens back to the Roman word for the distinctly unamusing maggot. Still other examples will forever alter the way one looks at things. Diners might be far less willing to slather butter on their toast if it were instead referred to in its original Greek as cow cheese. Barnette's etymological sleuthing, itself a word of animal derivation, is as educational as it is engrossing.
Price:
3.00 USD
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