How Happy Became Homosexual: And Other Mysterious Semantic Shifts

If some word-thug presents you with the fulsome arguments insisting that only the "original" meaning of a particular word is correct, this book will be just the thing to help you decimate thateir stancearguments. Language columnist Howard Richler (Strange Bedfellows) presents the curious histories of more than 400 well-known words whose meanings have shifted quite a bit since they first appeared in English. The one-paragraph expositions are grouped into a dozen thematic chapters covering such things as religious, agricultural, military, and legal origins, words that have come to mean things much better or worse, and some general sets of verbs, nouns, and adjectives. The readerYou will find some word-thug favorites here, such as decimate, fulsome, enormity, and hopefully, along with old friends with unexpected pasts such as thing, nice, and silly, and many other surprises for words such as cunning, dollop, loophole, paraphernalia, and thug. Richler sometimes omits the "why" in his recounting of the "what," and occasionally misses the mark a little, as in his characterization of the use of "trivial" by mathematicians, but if you care about words and language you will be very glad to add this book to your magazine (in the old sense of magazine, of course). (June) Distribution: Small Press Distribution, Baker & Taylor and Ingram.