The Secret Life of Words: English Words and Their Origins
Other by Professor Anne Curzan
Released 2012
Tracklist
- 1Winning Words, Banished Words
- 2The Life of a Word, From Birth to Death
- 3The Human Hands Behind Dictionaries
- 4Treasure Houses, Theft, and Traps
- 5Yarn and Clues — New Word Meanings
- 6Smog, Mob, Bling — New Words
- 7“often” Versus “offen” — Pronunciation
- 8Fighting Over Zippers
- 9Opening the Early English Word-Hoard
- 10Safe and Sound — The French Invasion
- 11Magnifical Dexterity — Latin and Learning
- 12Chutzpah to Pajamas — World Borrowings
- 13The Pop/Soda/Coke Divide
- 14Maths, Wombats, and Les Bluejeans
- 15Foot and Pedestrian — Word Cousins
- 16Desultory Somersaults — Latin Roots
- 17Analogous Prologues — Greek Roots
- 18The Tough Stuff of English Spelling
- 19The B in Debt — Meddling in Spelling
- 20Of Mice, Men, and Y’all
- 21I’m Good … or Am I Well?
- 22How Snuck Sneaked In
- 23Um, Well, Like, You Know
- 24Wicked Cool — The Irreverence of Slang
- 25Boy Toys and Bad Eggs — Slangy Wordplay
- 26Spinster, Bachelor, Guy, Dude
- 27Firefighters and Freshpersons
- 28A Slam Dunk — The Language of Sports
- 29Fooling Around — The Language of Love
- 30Gung Ho — The Language of War
- 31Filibustering — The Language of Politics
- 32LOL — The Language of the Internet
- 33#$@%! — Forbidden Words
- 34Couldn’t (Or Could) Care Less
- 35Musquirt and Other Lexical Gaps
- 36Playing Fast and Loose With Words