By David Wilton
This e-book is written from an identical viewpoint as Jan Brunvand's The Vanishing Hitchhiker and its sequels. This one specializes in city legends in regards to the historic origins of phrases and words. writer David Wilton starts with a dialogue of ways city legends come up, why we repeat them to each other, and the way they need to be investigated.
The seven major chapters of the e-book debunk a number of linguistic city legends. between them are:
- Eskimos have 50 (or 500) diverse phrases for snow.
- The "F-word" is a British acronym.
- The Morse code "SOS" stands for "Save Our Ship."
- The flush bathroom was once invented through Thomas Crapper.
- "Handicapped" derived from "hand in cap" and observed a beggar.
- President Kennedy stated, "I am a jelly doughnut" in German in the course of a speech in Berlin.
- "Spud" comes from the "Society for Prevention of Unwholesome Diet"
This ebook is usually recommended for the attention-grabbing motives it provides for commonly-used phrases and words. As others have famous, it will possibly have benefitted from the extra attentions of an exceptional editor.
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Additional info for Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends
Example text
All day. m. The letters do indeed appear to be ok, but their meaning, if there is a meaning, cannot be deduced. There is no plausible reason why Richardson would write a term meaning “all right” at this point in the document. More likely, the letters are simply a fragment of an incomplete phrase. 8 When Read solved the mystery of the origin of OK in 1963, he seemingly had found the Holy Grail of American etymology. But the 1960s saw the rise of a new phrase that would eventually take the place of OK as the greatest etymological mystery.
Most will have some relics of Elizabethan language that have fallen out of use elsewhere. Those that are isolated, like Appalachia, may retain a few more archaisms than dialects that have a lot of contact with the outside world, but even these isolated dialects change. The mountain speech of Appalachia or the Ozarks is no more like Elizabethan English than any other dialect, even if a few words or the occasional grammatical structure are similar. Still the lure of this legend is strong. Those who speak a nonstandard dialect are often stigmatized.
The civil law gave the husband the same, or a larger, authority over his wife; allowing him, for some misdemeanors, flagellis et fustibus acriter verbare uxorem (to wound his wife severely with whips and fists); for others, only modicam castigationem adhibere (to apply modest corrective punishment). But, with 40 Word Myths us, in the politer reign of Charles the second, this power of correction began to be doubted, and a wife may now have security of the peace against her husband; or, in return, a husband against his wife.