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"The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857, took seventy years to complete, drew from tens of thousands of brilliant minds, and organized the sprawling language into 414,825 precise definitions. But hidden within the rituals of its creation is a fascinating and mysterious story - a story of two remarkable men whose strange twenty-year relationship lies at the core of this historic undertaking." "Professor James Murray, an astonishingly...
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"An exhilarating and laugh-out-loud debut novel from a prize-winning new talent which chronicles the misadventures of a lovelorn Victorian lexicographer and the young woman put on his trail a century later to root out his misdeeds while confronting questions of her own sexuality and place in the world"--
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"What do unicorns, law, love, and hell all have in common? They are all unfortunate words of the BIble. Through mistranslation, cultural shifts, anachronisms, and misguided intentions, this book traces several key words whose meaning is commonly misunderstood in our world today. If the blatant mistranslation of unicorns could survive in the Bible for thousands of years, securing their place in our cultural imagination to this day, what would happen...
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1,000 food-related terms and expressions, ranging from old chestnut to red herring to fruitcake to couch potato. What has "ham" to do with overacting? Why does "nut" stand for a man's head and his gonads? Why do we say "Holy mackerel?" Quotations abound, from 4000 B.C. to the present. This book is addressed to foodies and word lovers.