Slang To-Day and Yesterday

Slang To-Day and Yesterday

Author: Eric Partridge

Publisher: Read Books Ltd

Published: 2013-04-18

Total Pages: 706

ISBN-13: 1447495799

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Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.


Slang

Slang

Author: Eric Partridge

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-04-17

Total Pages: 807

ISBN-13: 1317432142

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First published in 1933, this book explores both contemporary and historical slang, focusing on the characteristics and quirks of the English and American languages. As well as looking at commonly used slang, there are sections that give the reader insight into more unusual areas such as Cockney slang, slang in journalism and slang in commerce, as well as slang used by sailors, the law and the church. The book will be of interest to scholars and the general readers who take an interest in language.


Rude Britannia

Rude Britannia

Author: Mina Gorji

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-04-15

Total Pages: 151

ISBN-13: 1136009906

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Media commentators have noted a rising public tolerance to the use of rude or offensive words in modern English. John Lydon’s obscene outburst on 'I’m a Celebrity...' only provoked a handful of complaints – a muted reaction compared to the furore following his use of the f-word on television twenty-eight years earlier. This timely and authoritative exploration of rudeness in modern English draws together experts from the academic world and the media – journalists, linguists, lexicographers and literary critics – and argues that rudeness is an important cultural phenomenon. Tightly edited with clear accessibly written pieces, the essays look at rudeness in: the media literature football chants street culture seaside postcards. With contributions from media figures including Tom Paulin and leading media-friendly linguists Deborah Cameron and Lynda Mugglestone, Rude Britannia raises concerns about linguistic and social codes, standards of decency, what is considered taboo in the public realm, constructions of bawdy, class, race, power and British identity.


Secret Language

Secret Language

Author: Barry J. Blake

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 0199691622

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This book is about language that is designed to mean what it does not seem to mean. Ciphers and codes conceal messages and protect secrets. Symbol and magic hide meanings to delight or imperil. Languages made to baffle and confuse let insiders talk openly without being understood by thosebeyond the circle.Barry Blake looks at these and many more. He explores the history and uses of the slangs and argots of schools and trades. He traces the centuries-old cants used by sailors and criminals in Britain, among them Polari, the mix of Italian, Yiddish, and slang once spoken among strolling players andcircus folk and taken up by gays in the twentieth century. He examines the sacred languages of ancient cults and religions, uncovers the workings of onomancy, spells, and gematria, looks into the obliqueness of allusion and parody, and celebrates the absurdities of euphemism and jargon.Secret Language takes the reader on fascinating excursions down obscure byways of language, ranging across time and culture. With revelations on every page it will entertain anyone with an urge to know more about the most arcane and curious uses of language.


The Queer Cultures of 1930s Prose

The Queer Cultures of 1930s Prose

Author: Charlotte Charteris

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-01-04

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 3030024148

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Offering a radical reassessment of 1930s British literature, this volume questions the temporal limits of the literary decade, and broadens the scope of queer literary studies to consider literary-historical responses to a variety of behaviours encompassed by the term ‘queer’ in its many senses. Whilst it is informed by the history of sexuality in twentieth-century Europe, it is also profoundly concerned with what Christopher Isherwood termed ‘the market value of the Odd.’ Drawing, for its methodology, on the work of Raymond Williams, it traces the impact of the Great War on the development of language, examining the use of ten ‘keywords’ in the prose of Christopher Isherwood, Evelyn Waugh and Patrick Hamilton, and that of their respective literary milieux, in order to establish how queer lives and modern sub-cultural identities were forged collaboratively within the fictional realm. By utilizing contemporary perspectives on performativity in conjunction with detailed close readings it repositions these authors as self-conscious agents actively producing their own queer masculinities through calculated acts of linguistic transgression.


Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain

Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain

Author: Benjamin Kohlmann

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-29

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1317145658

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Offering the first book-length consideration of Edward Upward (1903-2009), one of the major British left-wing writers, this collection positions his life and works in the changing artistic, social and political contexts of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Upward’s fiction and non-fiction, from the 1920s onwards, illustrate the thematic and formal richness of left-wing writing during the twentieth-century age of extremes. At the same time, Upward’s work shows the inherent tensions of a life committed at once to writing and to politics. The full range of Upward’s work and a wealth of unpublished materials are examined, including his early fantastic stories of the 1920s, his Marxist fiction of the 1930s, the extraordinary semi-autobiographical trilogy The Spiral Ascent and his formally and thematically innovative later stories. The essays collected here reevaluate Upward’s central place in twentieth-century British literary culture and assess his legacy for the twenty-first century.