The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities

Open The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities and you’ll find both a word and a day to remember, every day of the year. Each day has its own dedicated entry, on which a curious or notable event—and an equally curious or notable word—are explored. On the day on which flirting was banned in New York City, for instance, you’ll discover why to “sheep’s-eye” someone once meant to look at them amorously. On the day on which a disillusioned San Franciscan declared himself Emperor of the United States, you’ll find the word “mamamouchi,” a term for people who consider themselves more important than they truly are. And on the day on which George Frideric Handel completed his 259-page Messiah after twenty-four days of frenzied work, you’ll see why a French loanword, literally meaning “a small wooden barrow,” is used to refer to an intense period of work undertaken to meet a deadline. The English language is vast enough to supply us with a word for every occasion—and this linguistic “wunderkammer” is here to prove precisely that. So whatever date this book has found its way into your hands, there’s an entire year’s worth of linguistic curiosities waiting to be found.

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Word Drops

If you're logofascinated, you are literally spellbound by language. Word Drops is a language fact book unlike any other, its linguistic tidbits all falling together into one long interconnected chain just with each fact neatly 'dropping' into place beside the next. What's more, throughout, footnotes are used to give informative and intriguing background to some of the most bizarre facts, covering everything from traditional Inuit games to the origin of the Bellini cocktail, from the precise length of one 'jiffy' to what the Romans thought hoopoe birds ate, and from what to expect on a night out with Dr Johnson to Samuel Pepys's cure for a hangover. Want to know the longest palindrome in Morse code, or who The Great Masticator was? Curious to know what Norwegian steam is, or what a jäääär is? The answers are all here. For all of the logofascinated among us, this is an immensely pleasurable and unpredictable collection that is guaranteed to raise eyebrows (the literal meaning, incidentally, of supercilious). 'Brilliant for anyone interested in the effervescent oddness of English' --Stig Abell

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Around the World in 80 Words

What makes a place so memorable that it survives forever in a word? In this captivating round-the-world tour, Paul Anthony Jones acts as your guide through the intriguing stories of how eighty places became immortalized in the English language. You’ll discover why the origins of turkeys, limericks, Brazil nuts, and Panama hats aren’t quite as straightforward as you might presume. If you’ve never heard of the tiny Czech mining town of Jáchymov—or Joachimsthal, as it was known until the late 1800s—you’re not alone, which makes its claim to fame as the origin of the word “dollar” all the more extraordinary. The story of how the Great Dane isn’t all that Danish makes the list, as does the Jordanian mountain whose name has become a byword for a tantalizing glimpse. We’ll also find out what the Philippines has given to your office inbox, what Alaska has given to your liquor cabinet, and how a speech given by a bumbling North Carolinian gave us a word for impenetrable nonsense. Surprising, entertaining, and illuminating, this is essential reading for armchair travelers and word nerds. Our dictionaries are full of hidden histories, tales, and adventures from all over the world—if you know where to look.

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The Cabinet of Calm

Open The Cabinet of Calm to find a comforting word that's equal to your troubles. Beginning with the griefs or discomforts we all feel on difficult days, Paul Anthony Jones offers us a matching linguistic remedy: fifty-one soothing words for troubled times. These kind words - alongside their definitions and their stories - will calm and inspire; comfort and delight; and provide fresh hope. Written with a trademark lightness of touch, The Cabinet of Calm shows us that we're not alone. Someone else has felt like this before, and so there's a word to help, whatever the challenge. So much more than a book of words, The Cabinet of Calm will soothe your soul and ease your mind.

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The Accidental Dictionary

Brimming with hidden histories and tantalising twists, The Accidental Dictionary tells the extraordinary stories behind ordinary words. Our everyday language is full of surprises; its origins are stranger than you might think. Any word might be knocked and buffeted, subjected to twists and turns, expansions and contractions, happy and unhappy accidents. There are intriguing tales behind even the most familiar terms, and they can say as much about the present as they do the past. Busking, for instance, originally meant piracy. Grin meant to snarl. A bimbo was a man, nice meant ignorant, glamour was magic and a cupboard was a table... Focusing on 100 surprising threads in the evolution of English, The Accidental Dictionary reveals the etymological origins and quirky developments that have led to the meanings we take for granted today. It is a weird and wonderful journey into words. "A real delight ... hidden gems nestle on every page" -- JaffaReadsToo "The Accidental Dictionary is certainly worth adding [to a bookshelf]... I knew very few of these, which is a good thing, and now I know more, which is a better one" -- Marcus Berkmann, Spectator Christmas books 2016

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Against Expression

Charles Bernstein has described conceptual "poetry pregnant with thought." Against Expression, the premier anthology of conceptual writing, presents work that is by turns thoughtful, funny, provocative, and disturbing. Editors Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith chart the trajectory of the conceptual aesthetic from early precursors such s Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp through major avant-garde groups of the past century, including Dada, Oulipo, Fluxus, and language poetry, to name just a few. The works of more than a hundred writers from Aasprong to Zykov demonstrate a remarkable variety of new ways of thinking about the nature of texts, information, and art, using found, appropriated, and randomly generated texts to explore the possibilities of non-expressive language.

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A Cabinet of Philosophical Curiosities

If you want to learn how to conform to confound, raze hopes, succeed your successor, order absence in the absence of order, win by losing and think contrapositively, look no further. Here you can unlock the secrets of Plato's void, Wittgenstein's investigations, Schopenhauer's intelligence test, Voltaire's big bet, Russell's slip of the pen and lobster logic. Among your discoveries will be why the egg came before the chicken, what the dishwasher missed and just what it was that made Descartes disappear. Experience the unbearable lightness of logical conclusions in Professor Sorensen's intriguing cabinet of riddles, problems, paradoxes, puzzles and the anomalies of human utterance. As you accompany him on investigations into the mysteries of truth, falsehood, reason and delusion, prepare to be surprised, enlightened, mystified and, above all, entertained.

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Radium of the Word

With fresh insight and contemporary relevance, Radium of the Word argues that a study of the form of language yields meanings otherwise inaccessible through ordinary reading strategies. Attending to the forms of words rather than to their denotations, Craig Dworkin traces hidden networks across the surface of texts, examining how typography, and even individual letters and marks of punctuation, can reveal patterns that are significant without being symbolic—fully meaningful without communicating any preordained message. Radium of the Word takes its title from Mina Loy’s poem for Gertrude Stein, which hails her as the Madame “Curie / of the laboratory / of vocabulary.” In this spirit, Dworkin considers prose as a dynamic literary form, characterized by experimentation. Dworkin draws on examples from writers as diverse as Lyn Hejinian, William Faulkner, and Joseph Roth. He takes up the status of the proper name in Modernism, with examples from Stein, Loy, and Guillaume Apollinaire, and he offers in-depth analyses of individual authors from the counter-canon of the avant-garde, including P. Inman, Russell Atkins, N. H. Pritchard, and Andy Warhol. The result is an inspiring intervention in contemporary poetics.

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MODERN PHILOLOGY HIS DISCOVERIES HISTORY AND INFLUENCE

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Modern Philology Its Discoveries History and Influence by Benjamin W Dwight

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The New Englander

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The Origins of Museums

In late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe a new phenomenon was developing - learned gentlemen who had perfected their gardens and libraries were setting about the business of creating the first collections. 'The Origins of Museums' is an extensive account of the 'cabinet of curiosities' or 'Wunderkammer' and explains how such cabinets gave rise to the beginnings of museums as we know them and of four centuries of collecting. The intellectual curiosity of the age encompassed interest in the natural world, peoples of antiquity and the discovery of the New World. Renaissance learning saw the emergence of naturalists such as Ulisse Aldrovandi and Conrad Gesner.

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Museum Bibliothek Stadtraum

Summary: Die Beiträge des Buches widmen sich historischen Wissensräumen und -ordnungen. Im Zentrum stehen die museale Sammlung, die Bibliothek und der Stadtraum. Dies sind paradigmatische Orte, an und in denen in der frühen Neuzeit Wissen geordnet, dargestellt und erzeugt wurde. Neben einzelnen Architekturmotiven wie dem Rundbau teilen sie einen enzyklopädischen Anspruch und basieren auf topischen Ordnungsverfahren. Über eine Architektur-, Institutionen- und Sammlungsgeschichte dieser Räume hinaus interessiert hier, inwiefern ihre Architektur, spezifische Raumordnung und mediale Ausstattung unmittelbaren Anteil an der Produktion und Rezeption von Wissen haben. So erscheinen die konkreten Räume von Museum, Bibliothek und Stadt nicht nur als situativer Rahmen, sondern vielmehr als konstitutiver Faktor Wissen generierender Prozesse.

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A Cabinet of Curiosities

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Modern Philology Historical sketch of the Indo European languages History of modern philology Science of etymology

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The Human Body s Cabinet of Etymological Curiosities

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Cabinets of Curiosities

Four Wisconsin artists, Martha Glowacki, Mark Lorenzi, Natasha Nicholson, and Mary Alice Wimmer, are passionate collectors who use objects from their own collections to inform their individual artwork. This catalog documents an installation by each of the four artists that is reminiscent of the 16th- and 17th- century Wunderkammer, or cabinet of wonders, private collections of natural and man-made objects. Distributed for the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin–Madison

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Curiosity in Early Modern Europe

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Voyage Into Language

David B. Paxman explores the connections between perceived space and language citing for example Cassirer's observation that since all of our knowledge of phenomena ultimately dissolves into a knowledge of temporal and spatial relations, this constitutes the truly objectifying principle of knowledge.

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West Africa in the Mid seventeenth Century

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