Totally Weird and Wonderful Words
Totally Weird and Wonderful Words

Author: Erin McKean

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2006-10-23

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 0199886032

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Do you know what a snollygoster is? Would you eat something called a muktuk? Do you know anyone who engages in onolatry? Impress your friends and pepper your dinner party conversations with such nuggets as gobemouche, mumpsimus, and cachinnate. You can learn about all of these bizarre and beautiful words and many more in Totally Weird and Wonderful Words. Offering a potpourri of colorful and fascinating words compiled by noted lexicographer Erin McKean, it contains hundreds of definitions, and has been updated to include two new essays, with over 150 words new to this edition. Written in a clear and conversational style, the book contains full-page cartoon illustrations by Roz Chast and Danny Shanahan. Featuring hundreds of words guaranteed to amuse and astonish, this is a book that will appeal to logophiles everywhere. It also features a bibliography of Oxford's dictionaries and a guide to creating your own unusual words correctly from Greek and Latin roots.

Drunk on All Your Strange New Words
Drunk on All Your Strange New Words

Author: Eddie Robson

Publisher: Tordotcom

Published: 2022-06-28

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1250807360

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Eddie Robson's Drunk on All Your Strange New Words is a locked room mystery in a near future world of politics and alien diplomacy. Lydia works as translator for the Logi cultural attaché to Earth. They work well together, even if the act of translating his thoughts into English makes her somewhat wobbly on her feet. She’s not the agency’s best translator, but what else is she going to do? She has no qualifications, and no discernible talent in any other field. So when tragedy strikes, and Lydia finds herself at the center of an intergalactic incident, her future employment prospects look dire—that is, if she can keep herself out of jail! But Lydia soon discovers that help can appear from the most unexpected source... At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Other-Wordly
Other-Wordly

Author: Yee-Lum Mak

Publisher: Chronicle Books

Published: 2016-10-11

Total Pages: 62

ISBN-13: 1452163111

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Discover words to surprise, delight, and enamor. Learn terms for the sunlight that filters through the leaves of trees, for dancing awkwardly but with relish, and for the look shared by two people who each wish the other would speak first. Other-Wordly is an irresistible ebook for lovers of words and those lost for words alike.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Author: John Koenig

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-11-16

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1501153668

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “It’s undeniably thrilling to find words for our strangest feelings…Koenig casts light into lonely corners of human experience…An enchanting book. “ —The Washington Post A truly original book in every sense of the word, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows poetically defines emotions that we all feel but don’t have the words to express—until now. Have you ever wondered about the lives of each person you pass on the street, realizing that everyone is the main character in their own story, each living a life as vivid and complex as your own? That feeling has a name: “sonder.” Or maybe you’ve watched a thunderstorm roll in and felt a primal hunger for disaster, hoping it would shake up your life. That’s called “lachesism.” Or you were looking through old photos and felt a pang of nostalgia for a time you’ve never actually experienced. That’s “anemoia.” If you’ve never heard of these terms before, that’s because they didn’t exist until John Koenig set out to fill the gaps in our language of emotion. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows “creates beautiful new words that we need but do not yet have,” says John Green, bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars. By turns poignant, relatable, and mind-bending, the definitions include whimsical etymologies drawn from languages around the world, interspersed with otherworldly collages and lyrical essays that explore forgotten corners of the human condition—from “astrophe,” the longing to explore beyond the planet Earth, to “zenosyne,” the sense that time keeps getting faster. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is for anyone who enjoys a shift in perspective, pondering the ineffable feelings that make up our lives. With a gorgeous package and beautiful illustrations throughout, this is the perfect gift for creatives, word nerds, and human beings everywhere.

The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities
The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities

Author: Paul Anthony Jones

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2019-10-14

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 022664670X

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Open The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities and you’ll find both a word and a day to remember, every day of the year. Each day has its own dedicated entry, on which a curious or notable event—and an equally curious or notable word—are explored. On the day on which flirting was banned in New York City, for instance, you’ll discover why to “sheep’s-eye” someone once meant to look at them amorously. On the day on which a disillusioned San Franciscan declared himself Emperor of the United States, you’ll find the word “mamamouchi,” a term for people who consider themselves more important than they truly are. And on the day on which George Frideric Handel completed his 259-page Messiah after twenty-four days of frenzied work, you’ll see why a French loanword, literally meaning “a small wooden barrow,” is used to refer to an intense period of work undertaken to meet a deadline. The English language is vast enough to supply us with a word for every occasion—and this linguistic “wunderkammer” is here to prove precisely that. So whatever date this book has found its way into your hands, there’s an entire year’s worth of linguistic curiosities waiting to be found.

Nigger
Nigger

Author: Randall Kennedy

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2008-12-18

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 0307538915

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Randall Kennedy takes on not just a word, but our laws, attitudes, and culture with bracing courage and intelligence—with a range of reference that extends from the Jim Crow south to Chris Rock routines and the O. J. Simpson trial. It’s “the nuclear bomb of racial epithets,” a word that whites have employed to wound and degrade African Americans for three centuries. Paradoxically, among many Black people it has become a term of affection and even empowerment. The word, of course, is nigger, and in this candid, lucidly argued book the distinguished legal scholar Randall Kennedy traces its origins, maps its multifarious connotations, and explores the controversies that rage around it. Should Blacks be able to use nigger in ways forbidden to others? Should the law treat it as a provocation that reduces the culpability of those who respond to it violently? Should it cost a person his job, or a book like Huckleberry Finn its place on library shelves?

STRANGE STRANGE THINGS: 550+ Supernatural Mysteries, Macabre & Horror Classics
STRANGE STRANGE THINGS: 550+ Supernatural Mysteries, Macabre & Horror Classics

Author: Edgar Allan Poe

Publisher: e-artnow

Published: 2018-10-25

Total Pages: 13364

ISBN-13: 802689815X

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The biggest collection of supernatural, macabre, eerie, and gothic tales is here! Grab your copy and get ready for the chills down your spine: Edgar Allan Poe: The Tell-Tale Heart The Cask of Amontillado The Black Cat… Henry James: The Turn of the Screw The Ghostly Rental… H. P. Lovecraft: The Dunwich Horror The Shunned House… Mary Shelley: Frankenstein The Mortal Immortal The Evil Eye… John William Polidori: The Vampyre Bram Stoker: Dracula The Jewel of Seven Stars The Lair of the White Worm… Algernon Blackwood: The Willows A Haunted Island A Case of Eavesdropping Ancient Sorceries… Gaston Leroux: The Phantom of the Opera Marjorie Bowen: Black Magic Charles Dickens: The Mystery of Edwin Drood Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray Washington Irving: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Théophile Gautier: Clarimonde The Mummy's Foot Richard Marsh: The Beetle Arthur Conan Doyle: The Hound of the Baskervilles The Silver Hatchet… Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Carmilla Uncle Silas… M. R. James: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary A Thin Ghost and Others Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White The Haunted Hotel The Devil's Spectacles E. F. Benson: The Room in the Tower The Terror by Night… Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Birth Mark The House of the Seven Gables… Ambrose Bierce: Can Such Things Be? Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories Arthur Machen: The Great God Pan The Terror… William Hope Hodgson: The House on the Borderland The Night Land M. P. Shiel: Shapes in the Fire Ralph Adams Cram: Black Spirits and White Grant Allen: The Reverend John Creedy Dr. Greatrex's Engagement… Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto William Thomas Beckford: Vathek Matthew Gregory Lewis: The Monk Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights Rudyard Kipling: The Phantom Rickshaw Guy de Maupassant: The Horla Jerome K. Jerome: Told After Supper…

Hearts of Oak
Hearts of Oak

Author: Eddie Robson

Publisher: Tordotcom

Published: 2020-03-17

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 1250260523

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"[Hearts of Oak packs in] the sort of profound and lacerating laughter that Robson's countrymen Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett perfected." –NPR Hearts of Oak is a delightful science fiction adventure from Eddie Robson, the creator of the acclaimed Welcome to Our Village, Please Invade Carefully. The buildings grow. And the city expands. And the people of the land are starting to behave abnormally. Or perhaps they’ve always behaved that way, and it’s normality that’s at fault. And the king of the land confers with his best friend, who happens to be his closest advisor, who also happens to be a talking cat. But that’s all perfectly natural and not at all weird. Iona, close to retirement, finds that the world she has always known is nothing like she always believed it to be. There are dark forces . . . not dark. There are uncanny forces . . . no, not uncanny. There are forces, anyway, mostly slightly odd ones, and they appear to be acting in mysterious ways. It’s about town planning, it’s about cats and it’s about the nature of reality. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Lexicon
Lexicon

Author: Max Barry

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2014-04-01

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0143125427

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"About as close you can get to the perfect cerebral thriller: searingly smart, ridiculously funny, and fast as hell. Lexicon reads like Elmore Leonard high out of his mind on Snow Crash." —Lev Grossman, New York Times bestselling author of The Magicians and The Magician King “Best thing I've read in a long time . . . a masterpiece.” —Hugh Howey, New York Times bestselling author of Wool Stick and stones break bones. Words kill. They recruited Emily Ruff from the streets. They said it was because she's good with words. They'll live to regret it. They said Wil Parke survived something he shouldn't have. But he doesn't remember. Now they're after him and he doesn't know why. There's a word, they say. A word that kills. And they want it back . . .