Skim through any English dictionary and you find the richest of vocabularies. Add the hundreds of wise, witty and plain silly phrases that pepper our speech and you have a colourful linguistic palette beyond compare. But where did it all come from? The Origins of Words and Phrases tells you exactly that, with the intriguing, amusing and surprising tales of more than 3,000 English utterances.
- Who was the real McCoy, smart alec, Fanny Adams and silly billy, or the first nerd, namby-pamby, thug, vandal or wally?
- The Bible, William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Rudyard Kipling and Salman Rushdie -- which of them gave us, 'naughty but nice', 'never the twain shall meet', 'fly in the ointment' and 'truth is stranger than fiction'?
- Aardvark and anorak, ketchup and kosher, pal and pyjamas - follow the epic voyages into English of words from China, India, Persia, South Africa, Australia and all places in between.
- From advertising and Arabic to texting and Yiddish -- 38 features on the big influences on English
- Over 100 fun and informative cartoons and illustrations