First released: 2012
About
- 1.Winning Words, Banished Words
- 2.The Life of a Word, From Birth to Death
- 3.The Human Hands Behind Dictionaries
- 4.Treasure Houses, Theft, and Traps
- 5.Yarn and Clues — New Word Meanings
- 6.Smog, Mob, Bling — New Words
- 7.“often” Versus “offen” — Pronunciation
- 8.Fighting Over Zippers
- 9.Opening the Early English Word-Hoard
- 10.Safe and Sound — The French Invasion
- 11.Magnifical Dexterity — Latin and Learning
- 12.Chutzpah to Pajamas — World Borrowings
- 13.The Pop/Soda/Coke Divide
- 14.Maths, Wombats, and Les Bluejeans
- 15.Foot and Pedestrian — Word Cousins
- 16.Desultory Somersaults — Latin Roots
- 17.Analogous Prologues — Greek Roots
- 18.The Tough Stuff of English Spelling
- 19.The B in Debt — Meddling in Spelling
- 20.Of Mice, Men, and Y’all
- 21.I’m Good … or Am I Well?
- 22.How Snuck Sneaked In
- 23.Um, Well, Like, You Know
- 24.Wicked Cool — The Irreverence of Slang
- 25.Boy Toys and Bad Eggs — Slangy Wordplay
- 26.Spinster, Bachelor, Guy, Dude
- 27.Firefighters and Freshpersons
- 28.A Slam Dunk — The Language of Sports
- 29.Fooling Around — The Language of Love
- 30.Gung Ho — The Language of War
- 31.Filibustering — The Language of Politics
- 32.LOL — The Language of the Internet
- 33.#$@%! — Forbidden Words
- 34.Couldn’t (Or Could) Care Less
- 35.Musquirt and Other Lexical Gaps
- 36.Playing Fast and Loose With Words