Speaking Freely: A Guided Tour of American English from Plymouth Rock to Silicon Valley - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 019510692X ISBN 13: 9780195106923

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1997

Synopsis

How in the world could a loud mouth turn into a trombone and then become a bazooka? With words, anything is possible, especially if they happen to be American words. The continuous influx of immigrants with their distinctive dialects, the impulse to improvise and experiment, and the relative freedom from rigid social restraints all make America the perfect place for language to percolate, to take on ever-changing shapes and textures and flavors, and to produce an inexhaustible supply of expressive possibilities. In the case of bazooka, we begin with a Dutch word, bazoo, meaning "loud mouth," move to an American comedian, Bob Burns, who called his homemade trombone a bazooka, and end with a U.S. Army Major who saw Burns's act and commandeered the word to name a new anti-tank rocket launcher you could hold on your shoulder.
Now, in Speaking Freely, Anne H. Soukhanov, author of the Word Watch column in the Atlantic Monthly and one of America's leading lexicographers, invites us into the irresistible world of words. Drawing on Stuart Berg Flexner's two most popular books--I Hear America Talking and Listening to America--and adding 40 per cent new material that covers the enormous changes in language over the past twenty years, Soukhanov provides a sweeping look at the richness and astonishing variety of American English. 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--the recent concern with ecology giving us such words as biodiversity, ecofriendly, and chloroflurocarbons, and the rise of the personal computer creating a plethora of distinctive terms, from floppy disk, homepage, and hackers to flammage, spam campaigns, barfogenesis, clickstream, cobweb site, cybercreep, and vaporware.
Beautifully printed, 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.

About this title

About the Author

About the Authors:
Anne H. Soukhanov is the "Word Watch" columnist for the Atlantic Monthly and executive editor of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition. Stuart Berg Flexner was one of America's most distinguished lexicographers, a major editor of The Random House Dictionary--The Unabridged Edition and author of The Dictionary of American Slang, among many other books.

Reviews

YA?An unusual, entertaining, etymological look at American English. The authors have continued and updated the study begun in I Hear America Talking (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1976; o.p.) and Listening to America (S & S, 1982; o.p.). Although there are fewer topics covered in this work, the format and style are similar to the earlier volumes. Attention-getting chapter titles such as "Cyberspace: I Hear America Clicking," "Communications: From Snail Mail to Email," and "Yo! America Raps" draw browsers into the text. Chapters present an overview that relates the topic to the evolving English language. They include discussions of specific words that came into being as a result of events or cultural changes. Despite the serious subject content, the style is breezy and informal. Arrangement is alphabetical by subject. The index includes most of the words discussed in the text. Numerous black-and-white photographs and quotes from history in sidebars present primary sources that relate to the summaries. An explanation in different type is given if the reason for inclusion is not immediately apparent. A must-purchase wherever the earlier volumes are in demand.?Claudia Moore, W. T. Woodson High School, Fairfax, VA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Atlantic Monthly columnist Soukhanov has done an excellent job of carrying on the work begun by the late, distinguished lexicographer Flexner, combining and revising parts of Flexner's I Hear America Talking (1976) and Listening to America (LJ 12/1/82) while adding new sections reflecting changes in American English since 1982. The new book has the same format as the earlier ones, combining chatty narratives with photographs and illustrations, brief histories of words and phrases, and informative and sometimes horrific asides. We learn that "bloomers" are named after Amelia Bloomer (1818-94), that "dirty dozen" originally referred to the practice of selling the 12 least healthy transported slaves at a bargain rate, and that "voice mail" became common as one consequence of the downsizing phenomenon of recent years. This resource is so readable that it can be browsed or read cover to cover. Recommended for public and academic libraries.?Peter A. Dollard, Alma Coll. Lib., Mich.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 019510692X
• ISBN 13: 9780195106923
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 480
• Editor: Flexner Stuart Berg, Soukhanov Anne H.