Speaking Freely : A Guided Tour Of American English From Plymouth Rock To Silicon Valley

New York, New York: Oxford University Press. Fine in Fine Dust Jacket. 1997. First Printing. Hard Cover. 472 pages: 8.75 x 11.25 in.: 3.6: KB#004676: Dustjacket now protected by a new Brodart Mylar Cover. Scarce, Out Of Print, Book. Here we discover not only the origin and history of many of our most delightful words but also the changing cultural conditions that produced them. With chapters on Americanisms, cyberspace, advertising, fighting words, fitness, geography, economics, sex, crime, gender, generation gaps, and many other subjects, Speaking Freely covers the whole spectrum of language in America from the Pilgrims to the present. In the chapter on American's love affair with booze, for instance, we have a rollicking history of all the delectable words we've devised to describe the condition of drunkenness and its insalubrious effects. If, for example, you were to find yourself frequently groggified, half-shaved, full as a fiddler's fart, balmy, owly-eyed, pifflicated, comboozelated, tanglefooted, ossified, petrified, snockered, or wazzocked, you would often suffer the jim-jams, the jitters, the heebie-jeebies, or the screaming meamies the next day, and would eventually come to be seen as an elbow-bender, a guzzler, a rumhead, swiller, or tosspot. Speaking Freely also explains the droves of new expressions entering our vocabularies. With over 400 illustrations and a generous offering of quotations from Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain to Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Hardwick, and many others, Speaking Freely takes the lid off the American language and shows us where it is, where it's been, and why it's ours. " .