Book description
Within the rambling house of words and language we all too often expect
to find doors with forbidding-sounding signs on them: 'Spelling',
'Grammar', 'Syntax', 'Etymology', 'Phonetics' and the like - signs that
discourage rather than invite entry. But behind these heavy doors the
house of words and language is a place of delight and curiosity: on
closer inspection its shelves are revealed to be groaning not with dry
and dusty tomes exhorting correctness of grammar and usage but with more
toothsome reading-matter: intriguing tales of unexpected word and phrase
origins; light-hearted explorations of the pleasures of wordplay;
listings of lexical peculiarities, from 'ghost letters' to words that
have no rhymes; and accounts and examples of the myriad types of
English, from slang to jargon, and from gobbledegook to text messaging.
Buttering Parsnips, Twocking Chavs is a guided tour of the English
language, presented in the form of a browsable miscellany of words and
phrases. It is arranged in 'seven ages' (chapters), tracing the 'birth'
of words (alphabets, word origins, etc.), their youthful playfulness and
occasional misdemeanours (word games, misspellings, etc.) and various
other stages of language 'life', culminating in death (last words, lost
words, etc.) and reincarnation (words that have changed their meaning).
Within each of these chapters clusters of loosely related material are
presented in a range of different forms - lists, boxes, small passages
of narrative text. The text is liberally dotted with amusing and
apposite quotations, amazing facts and other nuggets. David Pickering
is an experienced reference book compiler, freelance since 1992. He has
contributed (often as sole author or chief editor) to around 200 books
in the fields of general reference, English language, the arts, history
and popular interest. He has also broadcast many times on a variety of
subjects on radio and television. He lives in Buckingham with his wife
and two sons. Martin H. Manser has been a professional reference book
editor since 1980. He has compiled or edited more than 150 reference
books, particularly English-language dictionaries, thesauruses, and
Bible reference titles. He is also a language trainer and consultant
with national companies and organizations. He and his wife live in
Aylesbury and have a son and a daughter.
