Have you ever wondered about the origin of son of a gun, flotsam and jetsam, or hunky-dory? Youll find the nautical derivation of these expressions and more than 250 others in this collection of nautical metaphors and colloquialisms. In addition, this book includes thought-provoking and entertaining examples of these words drawn from literature, movies, and song, and contains sections of legends of the sea and weather lore. Fascinating reading for sailors and language enthusiasts alike.

Heres the scuttlebutt: Barge right in and swallow the anchor, and lets chew the fat and splice the main brace til were three sheets to the wind. Listen, you son of a sea cook, Im tired of minding my Ps and Qs. I tell you, Im all at sea, and this is the bitter end. Nothing I can do will keep this ship on an even keel. Hells bells! You think I didnt tell it to the old man? Delivered a broadside, I did, but he just called me a loose cannon. Maybe I caught him between wind and water. Listen, mate. Youd better bootleg a bible aboard. Were sailing under false colors, and where were headed its cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. Its Davy Jones locker Im talking about. The crew was scraped from the bottom of the barrel. They dont know the ropes, and anyway theyre deserting like rats from a sinking ship. Its time to fish or cut bait, mate, or therell be the devil to pay. No use flogging a dead horse. Lets stay armed to the teeth and look for any port in a storm. Therell be nothing but flotsam and jetsam when this tub goes down the hatch.

This volume tells the story of the English language in Ireland over the first millennium. It explains how speakers of English, Scots and Irish Gaelic forged a linguistic amalgam that was carried around the world. It shows how the distilled essence of the language of the three communities provided a rich medium for writers, and suggests that this variety has contributed greatly to World English. The book traces the history of the English language in Ireland, its relationship with Irish Gaelic, its development into varieties now known as Anglo-Irish, Ulster Scots and Hiberno-English, and its spread to other parts of the world, including North America, Australia, Britain, the Caribbean and Africa. The book also includes a dictionary of Irish words in English.

Defining the geographical space of linguistic variation and drawing the areal distribution of linguistic variants are classical issues in dialectology. Over recent decades, advances in geolinguistic methods, along with new trends in the study of linguistic variation, have significantly shaped new ways of approaching limits and areas in dialectology.This volume is at the crossroads of recent methodological and conceptual developments in dialectology and brings together contributions offering an unusual panorama of case studies from Basque, Romance, Germanic, Celtic, and Slavic languages. The seventeen chapters in this volume address a wide spectrum of issues exploring new approaches to the interplay of dialect areas and time and society (Part I), current quantitative methods of studying dialect limits (Part II), and linguistic geovariation focused on lexical, prosodic, syntactic or morphosyntactic topics (Part III).One of the unique features of the volume is the important collection of contributions addressing issues of dialect syntax, a recent and rapidly growing field of linguistic research.