This book continues Julie Coleman's acclaimed history of dictionaries of English slang and cant. It describes the increasingly systematic and scholarly way in which such terms were recorded and classified in the UK, the USA, Australia, and elsewhere, and the huge growth in the publication of and public appetite for dictionaries, glossaries, and guides to the distinctive vocabularies of different social groups, classes, districts, regions, and nations. Dr Coleman describes the origins of words and phrases and explores their history. By copious example she shows how they cast light on everyday life across the globe - from settlers in Canada and Australia and cockneys in London to gang-members in New York and soldiers fighting in the Boer and First World Wars - as well as on the operations of the narcotics trade and the entertainment business and the lives of those attending American colleges and British public schools.
The slang lexicographers were a colourful bunch. Those featured in this book include spiritualists, aristocrats, socialists, journalists, psychiatrists, school-boys, criminals, hoboes, police officers, and a serial bigamist. One provided the inspiration for Robert Lewis Stevenson's Long John Silver. Another was allegedly killed by a pork pie.
Julie Coleman's account will interest historians of language, crime, poverty, sexuality, and the criminal underworld.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
...Coleman's meticulous analysis uncovers a world of lexicographers who were often as colourful as the terms they were compiling...Coleman's research is carefully embedded in its relevant social framework, from the language of itinerant workers to that of criminals and school boys... * Maria Taylor, Times Literary Supplement *
Reihe
Sprache
Verlagsort
Zielgruppe
Für höhere Schule und Studium
Illustrationen
Maße
Höhe: 241 mm
Breite: 163 mm
Dicke: 32 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-0-19-954937-5 (9780199549375)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Julie Coleman is Reader in English at the University of Leicester and founder of the International Society for Historical Lexicography and Lexicology. Her research interests lie in the history of the English language, particularly the history of the lexis. She is the author of A Thesaurus of Love, Sex, and Marriage, Rodopi 1999. The first two volumes of her history of cant and slang dictionaries, on the periods 1567-1784 and 1785-1858, were published by OUP in 2004. A fourth volume taking the history to 1984 is in preparation.
Autor*in
, University of Leicester
Introduction ; 1. John Camden Hotten ; 2. International Slang Dictionaries of the 1880s and 1890s ; 3. Farmer and Henley's Slang and its Analogues ; 4. Other British General Slang Dictionaries ; 5. British School and University Glossaries ; 6. Australian Slang Dictionaries ; 7. Dictionaries of General American Slang ; 8. American School and University Glossaries ; 9. Dictionaries of First World War Slang ; 10. Dictionaries of Homelessness ; 11. Dictionaries of Crime ; 12. Glossaries of the Entertainment Industries ; Conclusion ; Appendix
