Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time
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Professorial Rant Ahead

Why Do We Say That? by Scott Matthews

May 28, 2023 by CoffeeShopReader Leave a Comment

When I teach History of English to English majors, I have an etymology assignment where they have to find the origins of a figure of speech. The hardest part of that assignment is almost always finding a reputable scholarly source to support whatever phrase you’ve chosen. Naturally when I saw Why Do We Say That? On the library shelf, I was hopeful. I was shortly thereafter disappointed. This book is indeed a collection of 101 idiomatic phrases (and most of them count as figurative) that […]

Filed Under: Non-Fiction Tagged With: etymology, figures of speech, history of english, idioms, langauge, Scott Matthews, Why Do We Say That!

CoffeeShopReader's CBR15 Review No:45 · Genres: Non-Fiction · Tags: etymology, figures of speech, history of english, idioms, langauge, Scott Matthews, Why Do We Say That! ·
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“A Table of Alphabetical Hard Words”: Our First English Dictionary

The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson

February 7, 2020 by andtheIToldYouSos Leave a Comment

Quite a bit has changed since this book was written; language has changed, attitudes towards language have changed, and culture overall has changed. Some pieces from this book have not aged well; it’s rather dismissive of some languages and cultures (weirdly judgmental over Japanese writing, for example) while being aggressively defensive of others. There is also little-to-no attention paid  to the many additions given to English by marginalized communities; I was surprised to come across very little about the contributions of people of color have […]

Filed Under: History, Non-Fiction Tagged With: #history, Anthropology, Bill Bryson, dialect, English, idioms, language, linguistics

andtheIToldYouSos's CBR12 Review No:12 · Genres: History, Non-Fiction · Tags: #history, Anthropology, Bill Bryson, dialect, English, idioms, language, linguistics ·
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