The image of the linguist as a stodgy old stick-in-the-mud, circling misplaced commas and mumbling in dead tongues, is just not true--at least not entirely. Any linguist worth her salt knows that languages change and keeps up with those changes. To make that task easier, the folks at Oxford University Press have put out a dictionary of more than 2,500 new words and phrases that have been popularized since the late 1980s. Editors Elizabeth Knowles and Julia Elliott provide definitions, usage notes, and etymologies for jelly shoes, road rage, and hot-desking, not to mention tree-hugger, feminazi, McJob, get a life, and not! The English language is alive and kicking, and Oxford has its finger on the semantic pulse.
Product Description
New words are the footprints of time. Just to recite some of the phrases that have become popular in the 1990s--feng shui, Generation X, jelly shoes, Netscape, Prozac, road rage, shock-jock, Twinkie defense, voice mail, warehouse club--is to fast-forward through our recent history. Now, in the second edition of The Oxford Dictionary of New Words, readers can savor a smorgasbord of new words and phrases that have been coined--or popularized--in the last ten years.
Here are hundreds of informative and intriguing articles that provide the pronunciation, definition, sample sentences, and, perhaps most important, the origin and informal history of over 2,500 words and phrases that have come into popular usage in recent years. The editors have drawn words from politics, the environmental movement, computers and technology, business, sports, and entertainment, from recent crazes such as Magic Eye art and microbreweries, politically charged terms such as tree-hugger, feminazi, lipstick lesbian, and McJob, and popular expressions such as "the _____ from hell" (waiter from hell, dentist from hell), "get a life," and "been there, done that." About 70% of the articles are new to this edition, and the repeat articles--on words included in the first edition which are still sufficiently prominent to warrant attention--have been either revised or newly written.
The Dictionary of New Words is a resource that is both useful and engaging, the first place to turn for information when faced with new words and phrases (from auto bra and Beltway Bandit to trainspotting, wormhole, and zaitech) and a gold mine of language for word lovers everywhere.
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