Tag Archive: 0language

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about language guides, and so thought I’d share another one I find particularly fascinating: This is the first edition of a book published by the Head of Modern Languages at Shrewsbury School in 1939: ‘Conversations about the New Germany—on and off parade’ (dust-jacket). The illustrations are by Phyllis […]

This week we received the printed copies of a catalogue that has been in the works for some time, and have finally mailed them out. Published to mark my tenth anniversary as an independent bookseller, it has been years in the making.  Many people know me for selling Russian material, but in fact my interest […]

Anthony Burgess died 20 years ago today, on 22 November 1993.  I think that happened to be the year I also read A Clockwork Orange for the first time.  As I was studying Russian, I was particularly drawn by Nadtsat, Burgess’s invented teenage slang (from the Russian suffix -nadtsat’, ‘-teen’): ‘horrorshow’ (from khorosho) for ‘good’; […]

Ever since (in fact, probably long before) I completed my MA in Lexicography, I have been fascinated by dictionaries, none more so than The Oxford English Dictionary (1884–1928), ‘the greatest treasure-house of any language in the world’ (PMM).  The origins of the OED lie in these two papers, On some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries, read by […]

For this week’s post, something a little different.  Can you solve this two rhymed rebuses from 1799?  You can look at the images on my Pinterest page, too.