Wicked Words

Wicked Words

Author: Hugh Rawson

Publisher: Three Rivers Press

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 435

ISBN-13: 9780517590898

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Describes the history of words used as curses, and looks at how the connotations of words change over time


Your Mother's Tongue

Your Mother's Tongue

Author: Stephen Burgen

Publisher:

Published: 1996-02-01

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 9780756774622

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An extremely funny history of so-called bad language by a European author. He asserts that Europeans try to get along but keep treading on each other's toes. In this tour of anger, exasperation, prejudice, irony and loathing as expressed in some 20 European tongues, we learn that what is invective in one country is sweet talk in another. A single currency in Europe? Yes. A common language? Not on your life. The Guardian review states that the book's "His gently comic tone recognizes how funny, how much of a release, much bad language can be." "Entertaining, widely informed."


Dante's Comedy and the Ethics of Invective in Medieval Italy

Dante's Comedy and the Ethics of Invective in Medieval Italy

Author: Nicolino Applauso

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-11-13

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 1498567797

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Dante's Comedy and the Ethics of Invective in Medieval Italy proposes a new approach to invective and comic poetry in Italy during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and opens the way for an innovative understanding of Dante’s masterpiece. The Middle Ages in Italy offer a wealth of vernacular poetic invectives—polemical verses aimed at blaming specific wrongdoings of an individual, group, city or institution— that are both understudied and rarely juxtaposed. No study has yet provided a scholarly examination of the connection between this medieval invective tradition, and its elements of humor, derision, and reprehension in Dante’s Comedy. This book argues that these comic texts are rooted in and actively engaged with the social, political, and religious conflicts of their time. Political invective has a dynamic ethical orientation that is mediated by a humor that disarms excessive hostility against its individual targets, providing an opening for dialogue. While exploring medieval comic poems by Rustico Filippi (from Florence), Cecco Angiolieri (from Siena), and Folgore da San Gimignano, this study unveils new biographical data about these poets retrieved from Italian state archives (most of these data are published here in English for the very first time), and ultimately shows what the medieval invective tradition can add to our understanding of Dante’s Comedy.