Jeffrey Kacirk
Autore di The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten
Sull'Autore
Fonte dell'immagine: Photographed by Susan Feldman
Opere di Jeffrey Kacirk
Informal English: Puncture Ladies, Egg Harbors, Mississippi Marbles, and Other Curious Words and Phrases of North… (2005) 73 copie
Kacirk's Forgotten English 2005 Calendar: A 365-Day Calendar of Vanishing Vocabulary and folklore for 2005 (2004) 2 copie
Jeffrey Kacirks Forgotten English: A 365-Day Calendar of Vanishing Vocabulary and Folklore for 2006 (2005) 2 copie
Forgotten English 2002 Calendar: A 365-Day Calendar of Vanishing Vocabulary and Folklore (2002) 1 copia
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Sesso
- male
- Nazionalità
- USA
- Nazione (per mappa)
- USA
- Luogo di nascita
- San Diego, California, USA
- Luogo di residenza
- Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
London, England, UK
New York, New York, USA
Portland, Oregon, USA
Marin County, California, USA
Utenti
Recensioni
Potrebbero anche piacerti
Statistiche
- Opere
- 16
- Utenti
- 1,357
- Popolarità
- #18,944
- Voto
- 3.8
- Recensioni
- 12
- ISBN
- 22
Petty-fogger - a term that is exactly what it sounds like--someone who promotes quarrels or encourages going to law for trivial reasons. Can’t imagine why we lost that word, but I think today we just call them ambulance-chasers.
Usufruct - Which was just to indicate the right of anyone to windfall fruit. The shepherds would take their crooks and pull fruit down, which is the origin of the current meaning of the word crook. How neat is that?
Scaramouch - a fencing term that evolved into a modern football “skirmish”.
Uzzle Pye - This one blew me away. Know the nursery rhyme “Sing a song of sixpence”? When the pie was open the birds began to sing. Did you ever take that literally? I didn’t. Well, seems they actually made pies, baked the crusts, tethered live birds in them, put a crust on top and then released the birds in a celebration.
Scuttled-Butt - A spot on the ship where sailors gathered to gossip. So, if you heard it at the scuttled butt, you passed it on. And, of course, it became scuttlebutt, which we still like to get in on from time to time.
And one that I did recognize right away:
Resurrectionist - A grave robber who exhumed bodies and sold them to scientist. The practice and the need for the term have gone, thankfully, but we still have the literary figure of Jerry Cruncher in [b:A Tale of Two Cities|1953|A Tale of Two Cities|Charles Dickens|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1344922523s/1953.jpg|2956372] to give an accurate depiction of what was entailed in the trade.
Needless to say, this is just a minor sampling of the words and stories included in this interesting book. I love words, and I read a number of classics where I am likely to run into some of these archaic terms, so the book serves a more immediate purpose. If you are like me, and you think words are worth studying in and of themselves, dig in, this one is fun.
“He hath been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scrapes” - William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost
… (altro)