Bagels, Bumf, and Buses: A Day in the Life of the English LanguageWhere do our everyday words come from? The bagel you eat for breakfast, the bumf you have to wade through at the office, and the bus that takes you home again: we use these words without thinking about their origins or how their meanings have changed over time. Simon Horobin takes the reader on a journey through a typical day, showing how the words we use to describe routine activities - getting up, going to work, eating meals - have surprisingly fascinating histories. |
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Bagels, Bumf, and Buses: A Day in the Life of the English Language Simon Horobin Limited preview - 2019 |
Bagels, Bumf, and Buses: A Day in the Life of the English Language Simon Horobin Limited preview - 2019 |
Common terms and phrases
abbreviation adopted alternative American football Anglo-Saxons animal appears Arabic association ball Bertie Wooster bird borrowing bread cake called cards club coffee coined COlin DEXter colour connection court crossword derived from Latin describe Despite developed dice diminutive form dish Dobermann drink Drones Club eighteenth century emoji etymologically expression football French verb Germanic word goes back hawk horse idioms initially Italian Italian word known language Latin word meaning literally means medieval Middle Ages modern English Nahuatl name given nineteenth century Old English Old English word Old French Old Norse origin lies originally referred P. G. Wodehouse pasta perhaps phrase play player popular pudding racket real tennis recorded resemble Roman Samuel Pepys score sense shot sixteenth century slang term snooker social media sound Spanish spelling Sport & leisure takes its name ultimately Urdu vape variant form verb meaning word originates word's worn