A lively, authoritative, and up-to-date look at the world of rhyming slang, from its origins in London's 19th-century underworld to the buzzwords of 21st-century popney. Arranged by topic, including Crime, Food and Drink, Illness, Money, Sex, and Sport, this highly readable collection is at once an informative source to the story behind some of our most lively expressions and a browser's delight.

This unique and authoritative dictionary contains over 1,100 of the most widely used proverbs in English, utilizing the latest research from the Oxford Languages team to source them. This edition has been thoroughly revised and updated, broadening the cultural range of the proverbs selected, and covering sayings of international origins. With a strong emphasis on concisely explaining the meaning of the proverbs described, the dictionary also provides additional examples of usage, and includes a fascinating history for many entries. Arranged in A-Z order and with a useful thematic index, A Dictionary of Proverbs is ideal for browsing and perfectly suited for quick reference. Look up your old favourites, learn punchy new expressions to get your point across, and find the answer to that crossword clue. It is never too late to learn: find proverbs relevant to every aspect of life in this entertaining and informative collection.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the syntactic variation of the dialects of Spanish. More precisely, it covers Spanish theoretical syntax that takes as its data source non-standard grammatical phenomena. Approaching the syntactic variation of Spanish dialects opens a door not only to the intricacies of the language, but also to a set of challenges of linguistic theory itself, including language variation, language contact, bilingualism, and diglossia. The volume is divided into two main sections, the first focusing on Iberian Spanish and the second on Latin American Spanish. Chapters cover a wide range of syntactic constructions and phenomena, such as clitics, agreement, subordination, differential object marking, expletives, predication, doubling, word order, and subjects. This volume constitutes a milestone in the study of syntactic variation, setting the stage for future work not only in vernacular Spanish, but all languages.

This book was first published in 1925 and was intended to be a dictionary of first world war slang. In the 1920s, "the war to end all wars" was still fresh in everyone's minds and the authors were commissioned to capture the combatants' sayings and expressions. Interestingly, although written nearly fifteen years before the next global conflict, the term "first world war" appears. Colonel Repington named his published history of the war as such. He did not want to flatter "the Boche" by calling it the "German War" so instead chose what became the prescient or perhaps pessimistic "first world war". This book was primarily designed as a Dictionary of War Slang at the instance of the authorities of the Imperial War Museum, using materials contributed by officers and men of all branches of the Service who had served with the British and Dominion forces. A large proportion of the slang of the war, however, comprised old pre-War Army and Navy expressions, which, in the War, were either adopted as they stood, so to speak, or else were altered and adapted to suit existing circumstances, and the enlargement of the original plan became unavoidable. The scope of the work has also been further extended to include a considerable number of Service terms, familiar among people in general, as being of interest in themselves or through their origins. A number of American service words and expressions, particularly some that became familiar among British troops during the war, have been included.

This book, by a group of leading international scholars, outlines the history of the spoken dialects of Arabic from the Arab Conquests of the seventh century up to the present day. It specifically investigates the evolution of Arabic as a spoken language, in contrast to the many existing studies that focus on written Classical or Modern Standard Arabic. The volume begins with a discursive introduction that deals with important issues in the general scholarly context, including the indigenous myth and probable reality of the history of Arabic; Arabic dialect geography and typology; types of internally and externally motivated linguistic change; social indexicalisation; and pidginization and creolization in Arabic-speaking communities. Most chapters then focus on developments in a specific region - Mauritania, the Maghreb, Egypt, the Levant, the Northern Fertile Crescent, the Gulf, and South Arabia - with one exploring Judaeo-Arabic, a group of varieties historically spread over a wider area. The remaining two chapters in the volume examine individual linguistic features of particular historical interest and controversy, specifically the origin and evolution of the b- verbal prefix, and the adnominal linker -an/-in. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students of the linguistic and social history of Arabic as well as to comparative linguists interested in topics such as linguistic typology and language change.

The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet people against Nazi Germany, known as the Eastern Front of World War II, continues to attract a number of military historians from different countries around the world. The frontline veterans' reminiscences occupy a prominent place among most important documents of that time. In contrast to official documents, these recollections reproduce the so-called truth of the foxholes, the genuine spirit of the war. The World World II veterans' reminiscences are full of idiomatic expressions, specialised terms and abbreviations peculiar to that war, and special dictionaries appeared in print and later on Internet web sites. Unlike most of the Allied countries, no war jargon dictionary has been published in Russia. This glossary is intended to begin to fill that gap. Several sources of the Red Army serviceman's slang were peculiar to the Soviet experience. The upheaval of the 1917 October Revolution and following Civil War, and the fundamental changes wrought by the political and social reforms and campaigns in the 1920s and 1930s, affected the Russian vocabulary substantially. The fact that the overwhelming majority of Red Army soldiers and officers came from rural households, and brought their local idioms and expressions into the trenches, also enriched the war vocabulary. Such expressions came into general circulation and also contributed to Russian wartime slang. Some words also appeared under the harsh conditions of the USSR far rear, where civilians struggled under conditions of hard labour and malnutrition. Lend-lease items entered the soldiers' parlance, often in the form of nicknames. Finally, any army has its traditions and slogans, many of which were revived in the Red Army during World War II.

The book is a collection of adapted humour inspired by other writers, interspersed with some original texts and a handful of philosophical views, mostly wrapped in humour. The texts include oblique references to adult obsessions and mild vernacular language in common usage by many aged 12 years and over. It is a joke book from cover to cover, most of which is unsuitable for younger children and anyone who cannot read without moving their lips. The book would have been in colour had I found my crayons.

Human language is a weird communication system: it has more in common with birdsong than with the calls of other primates. Jean Aitchison explores the origins of human language and how it has evolved. She likens the search to a vast prehistoric jigsaw puzzle, in which numerous fragments of evidence must be assembled. Such evidence is pieced together from a mixture of linguistic and nonlinguistic sources such as evolution theory, archaeology, psychology, and anthropology. This is an accessible and wide-ranging introduction to the origins and evolution of human language.

Audio recordings of English are available from the first half of the twentieth century and thus complement the written data sources for the recent history of the language. This book is the first to bring together a team of globally recognised scholars to document and analyse these early recordings in a single volume. Looking at examples of regional varieties of English from England, Scotland, Ireland, the USA, Canada and other anglophone countries, the volume explores both standard and vernacular varieties, and demonstrates how accents of English have changed between the late nineteenth century and the present day. The socio-phonetic examinations of the recordings will be of interest to scholars of historical linguistics, the history of the English language, language variation and change, phonetics, and phonology.

The colour coded verb table allows the reader to focus all of their attention on one colour tense at a time enabling them to make immediate connections between the subject and the verb! The Valencian LearnBots are a great resource for dyslexic learners, children and adult learners. Children can start to identify what a verb is and the way it changes with the subject of the sentence. Advanced learners can go on to learn the different tenses and improve their accuracy. This book also works along-side its very own kick-starter app on Googles Android and Apples App Store allowing the user the ability to hear some of the conjugations being read out loud by a native speaker. The app also allows the user to test their ability in remembering verbs and conjugations.

Careful writers and speakers agree that cliches are generally to be avoided. However, nearly all of us continue to use them. Why do they persist in our language? In It's Been Said Before, lexicographer Orin Hargraves examines the peculiar idea and power of the cliche. He helps readers understand why certain phrases became cliches and why they should be avoided - or why they still have life left in them. Indeed, cliches can be useful - even powerful. And few people even agree on which expressions are cliches and which are not. Many regard any frequent idiom as a cliche, and a phrase regarded as a cliche in one context may be seen simply as an effective expression in another. Examples drawn from data about actual usage support Hargraves' identification of true cliches. They also illuminate his commentary on usage problems and helpful suggestions for eliminating cliches where they serve no useful purpose. Concise and lively, It's Been Said Before serves as a guide to the most overused phrases in the English language - and to phrases that are used exactly as often as they should be.

Slang, however one judges it, shows us at our most human. It is used widely and often, typically associated with the writers of noir fiction, teenagers, and rappers, but also found in the works of Shakespeare and Dickens. It has been recorded since at least 1500 AD, and today's vocabulary, taken from every major English-speaking country, runs to over 125,000 slang words and phrases. This Very Short Introduction takes readers on a wide-ranging tour of this fascinating sub-set of the English language. It considers the meaning and origins of the word 'slang' itself, the ideas that a make a word 'slang', the long-running themes that run through slang, and the history of slang's many dictionaries. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Scots: The Mither Tongue is a classic of contemporary Scottish culture and essential reading for those who care about their country's identity in the twenty-first century. It is a passionately written history of how the Scots have come to speak the way they do and has acted as a catalyst for radical changes in attitude towards the language. In this completely revised edition, Kay vigorously renews the social, cultural and political debate on Scotland's linguistic future, and argues convincingly for the necessity to retain and extend Scots if the nation is to hold on to its intrinsic values. Kay places Scots in an international context, comparing and contrasting it with other lesser-used European languages, while at home questioning the Scottish Executive's desire to pay anything more than lip service to this crucial part of our national identity. Language is central to people's existence, and this vivid account celebrates the survival of Scots in its various dialects, its literature and song. The mither tongue is a national treasure that thrives in many parts of the country and underpins the speech of everyone who calls themselves a Scot.

From baby boomers with 'groovy' and 'yuppie' to Generation X with 'whatever' and 'like,' each generation inevitably generates original words that come out of its social and historical context. Those words not only tell us a great deal about the people in those generations, but also highlight the differences between them and other generations. In this book, Allan Metcalf, author of OK, uses a special framework of defining American generations to show that each generation of those born within a particular 20-year time period can be identified and characterized by words it chooses to use. By sampling from as far back as the American Revolution, Metcalf carefully constructs a comprehensive account of the history and usage of words associated with each generation in the American language. With special attention to the differences in vocabulary among the generations currently living-the sometimes awkward Millennials, the grunge music of Generation X, hippies among the Boomers, and bobbysoxers among the Silents - From Skeddadle to Selfie compiles dozens of words we have come to recognize or use and tells the unheard stories of each in its role of accompanying its generation through the times.

This dictionary covers a multitude of Scots words and expressions, some of which have entered into English worldwide, some of which are peculiarly Scottish and communicate much about Scotland's unique culture and society. Often light in tone, it offers valuable insight into the linguistic development of Scots.

Tradition, community, and pride are fundamental aspects of the history of Appalachia, and the language of the region is a living testament to its rich heritage. Despite the persistence of unflattering stereotypes and cultural discrimination associated with their style of speech, Appalachians have organized to preserve regional dialects -- complex forms of English peppered with words, phrases, and pronunciations unique to the area and its people. Talking Appalachian examines these distinctive speech varieties and emphasizes their role in expressing local history and promoting a shared identity.

Beginning with a historical and geographical overview of the region that analyzes the origins of its dialects, this volume features detailed research and local case studies investigating their use. The contributors explore a variety of subjects, including the success of African American Appalachian English and southern Appalachian English speakers in professional and corporate positions. In addition, editors Amy D. Clark and Nancy M. Hayward provide excerpts from essays, poetry, short fiction, and novels to illustrate usage. With contributions from well-known authors such as George Ella Lyon and Silas House, this balanced collection is the most comprehensive, accessible study of Appalachian language available today.

If you believe idioms are a "tough nut to crack," this Dictionary of Idioms will help you dispel that belief; you would surely abandon your opinion of idioms being a bunch of insignificant words to that of a lively one to use to attract attention of readers and listeners. You will discover 'idioms' can add beauty, remove unwanted seriousness and bring life to any conversation - written or spoken. Rightly and scientifically designed, this dictionary contains hundreds of common idioms, sayings, and expressions. Use of everyday idioms bring colour to any writing and speech. Since they don't really mean, word by word, what they say, idioms can stump even regular writers and speakers. When and where to uidioms becomes 'as easy as pie' with this Dictionary of Idioms. Alphabetical listing makes searching idioms a 'piece of cake.' Whether you are fluent in English or just a learner, this dictionary can help you read, write and speak with new understanding and a lot more fun! Special features: o Widely used and popular idioms given with meanings o Inclusion of foreign idioms currently in use in English language o Arranged Alphabetically: A - Z o Useful grammatical information given as Appendices An authoritative dictionary to spice up written and oral communication for students, writers, speakers and interested readers!

Shape up your English with thousands of idioms.

Whether you are a learner of English who is having difficulty understanding expressions in everyday speech or a native speaker who wants to expand your written or spoken range, you need a comprehensive reference for idioms, common phrases, and sayings of American English. "McGraw-Hill's American Idioms Dictionary" shows you the ropes of English and helps you: . . Expand your English-speaking abilities with these 14,000-plus expressions, proverbs, and common sayings, listed alphabetically . Use American idioms correctly by following the many helpful examples . Easily find the right phrase by one of its key words . . .

Some examples of the colorful English language, as spoken by Americans: .

at peace relaxed and happy
. every trick in the book every deceptive method known
. Johnny-on-the-spot someone who is in the right place at the right time
. make a killing to have a great success, especially in making money
. nine-to-five job a job with normal daytime hours
. scream bloody murder to complain bitterly
. take a powder to leave; to leave town

Slang, writes Michael Adams, is poetry on the down low, and sometimes lowdown poetry on the down low, but rarely, if ever, merely lowdown. It is the poetry of everyday speech, the people's poetry, and it deserves attention as language playing on the cusp of art. In Slang: The People's Poetry, Adams covers this perennially interesting subject in a serious but highly engaging way, illuminating the fundamental question "What is Slang" and defending slang--and all forms of nonstandard English--as integral parts of the American language. Why is an expression like "bed head" lost in a lexical limbo, found neither in slang nor standard dictionaries? Why are snow-boarding terms such as "fakie," "goofy foot," "ollie" and "nollie" not considered slang? As he addresses these and other lexical curiosities, Adams reveals that slang is used in part to define groups, distinguishing those who are "down with it" from those who are "out of it." Slang is also a rebellion against the mainstream. It often irritates those who color within the lines--indeed, slang is meant to irritate, sometimes even to shock. But slang is also inventive language, both fun to make and fun to use. Rather than complain about slang as "bad" language, Adams urges us to celebrate slang's playful resistance to the commonplace and to see it as the expression of an innate human capacity, not only for language, but for poetry.

A unique creole language spoken on the coastal islands and adjacent mainland of South Carolina and Georgia, Gullah existed as an isolated and largely ignored linguistic phenomenon until the publication of Lorenzo Dow Turner's landmark volume Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. In his classic treatise, Turner, the first professionally trained African American linguist, focused on a people whose language had long been misunderstood, lifted a shroud that had obscured the true history of Gullah, and demonstrated that it drew important linguistic features directly from the languages of West Africa. Initially published in 1949, this groundbreaking work of Afrocentric scholarship opened American minds to a little-known culture while initiating a means for the Gullah people to reclaim and value their past. The book presents a reference point for today's discussions about ever-present language varieties, Ebonics, and education, offering important reminders about the subtleties and power of racial and cultural prejudice.

In their introduction to the volume, Katherine Wyly Mille and Michael B. Montgomery set the text in its sociolinguistic context, explore recent developments in the celebration of Gullah culture, and honor Turner with a recounting of his life and scholarly accomplishments.

Ebonics Is Good is a humble response to the clarion call by Mwalimu Carter G. Woodson, Mwalimu Frantz Fanon, and Mwalimu Malcolm X, among others, to address our African language question. As all of these great Africans and others have shown throughout history, it behooves us to counter the assumption of the ill-informed that Ebonics is bad by demonstrating that it is a GOOD language and worthy of respect. Ebonics Is Good explores the following topics: Linguistic Reality of African American English Sociolinguistics of African American English Politico-Sociolinguistic Reality of African American English Social Construction of Ebonics: A Fasoldian Perspective The Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) Initiative Linguistic Connections between the African, Jamaican and Negro National Anthems

Book & CD-ROM. During the mid-20th century, old South Greenlanders still spoke their genuine dialects when Maliaraq Vebaek, herself a South Greenlander, born 1917, collected on tape stories and descriptions of pre-modern daily life from 42 informants. In this volume, the texts appear in dialectal transcription and translated into English, as well as in sound on the inserted CD-ROM, containing the tape recordings. Among the South Greenlandic dialects, the southernmost from the Cape Farewell region, which is now extinct, attracts particular interest, because this area received emigrants from the gradually depopulated south-east coast during the 19th century. The so-called qavak-dialect of the Cape Farewell region thus became an interesting mixture of the southeast and southwest Greenlandic dialects. This publication is targetted at linguists and is the first and only presentation of the South Greenlandic dialects. A phonological introduction is offered for the benefit of the linguists, but any reader of English (or the dialects) interested in stories, Greenland etc. can fully enjoy the texts.

"Bastard Tongues "is an exciting, firsthand story of scientific discovery in an area of research close to the heart of what it means to be human--what language is, how it works, and how it passes from generation to generation, even where historical accidents have made normal transmission almost impossible. The story focuses on languages so low in the pecking order that many people don't regard them as languages at all--Creole languages spoken by descendants of slaves and indentured laborers in plantation colonies all over the world. The story is told by Derek Bickerton, who has spent more than thirty years researching these languages on four continents and developing a controversial theory that explains why they are so similar to one another. A published novelist, Bickerton (once described as "part scholar, part swashbuckling man of action") does not present his findings in the usual dry academic manner. Instead, you become a companion on his journey of discovery. You learn things as he learned them, share his disappointments and triumphs, explore the exotic locales where he worked, and meet the colorful characters he encountered along the way. The result is a unique blend of memoir, travelogue, history, and linguistics primer, appealing to anyone who has ever wondered how languages grow or what it's like to search the world for new knowledge.

GET D!RTY
Next time you're traveling or just chattin' in German with your friends, drop the textbook formality and bust out with expressions they never teach you in school, including:
-Cool slang
-Funny insults
-Explicit sex terms
-Raw swear words
"Dirty German" teaches the casual expressions heard every day on the streets of Germany:

-What's up?
Wie geht's?
-I'm smashed.
Ich bin total angeschickert.
-Fuckin' Munich fans.
Schei Munchen Fans.
-That shit reeks.
Das riecht aber ubel.

-I wanna shag ass.
Ich will abhauen.
-What a complete asshole.
Was fur ein Arschloch.
-Dude, you're built like Arnold!
Mensch, du bist der Arnie!