Curzan, Anne. Great Courses Audio.

Great courses

Lecturer: Anne Curzan

From new words such as "bling" and "email" to the role of text messaging and other electronic communications, English is changing all around us. Discover the secrets behind the words in our everyday lexicon with this delightful, informative survey of English, from its Germanic origins to the rise of globalization and cyber-communications. Professor Curzan approaches words like an archaeologist, digging below the surface to uncover the story of words, from the humble "she" to such SAT words as "conflagration" and "pedimanous." In these 36 fascinating lectures, you'll discover the history of the dictionary and how words make it into a reference book like the Oxford English Dictionary; survey the borrowed words that make up the English lexicon; find out how words are born and how they die; expand your vocabulary by studying Greek and Latin "word webs"; and revel in new terms, such as "musquirt," "adorkable," and "struggle bus." English is an omnivorous language and has borrowed heavily from the many languages it has come into contact with, from Celtic and Old Norse in the Middle Ages to the dozens of world languages in the truly global 20th and 21st centuries. You'll be surprised to learn that the impulse to conserve "pure English" is nothing new. In fact, if English purists during the Renaissance had their way, we would now be using Old English compounds such as "flesh-strings" for "muscles" and "bone-lock" for "joint." You may not come away using terms like "whatevs" or "multislacking" in casual conversation, but you'll love studying the linguistic system that gives us such irreverent - and fun - slang, from "boy toy" to "cankles." All Lectures: 1. Winning Words, Banished Words 2. The Life of a Word, from Birth to Death 3. The Human Hands behind Dictionaries 4. Treasure Houses, Theft, and Traps 5. Yarn and Clues - New Word Meanings 6. Smog, Mob, Bling - New Words 7. "Often" versus "Offen" - Pronunciation 8. Fighting over Zippers 9. Opening the Early English Word-Hoard 10. Safe and Sound - The French Invasion 11. Magnifical Dexterity - Latin and Learning 12. Chutzpah to Pajamas - World Borrowings 13. The Pop/Soda/Coke Divide 14. Maths, Wombats, and Les Bluejeans 15. Foot and Pedestrian - Word Cousins 16. Desultory Somersaults - Latin Roots 17. Analogous Prologues - Greek Roots 18. The Tough Stuff of English Spelling 19. The b in Debt - Meddling in Spelling 20. Of Mice, Men, and Y'All 21. I'm Good ... Or Am I Well? 22. How Snuck Sneaked In 23. Um, Well, Like, You Know 24. Wicked Cool - The Irreverence of Slang 25. Boy Toys and Bad Eggs - Slangy Wordplay 26. Spinster, Bachelor, Guy, Dude 27. Firefighters and Freshpersons 28. A Slam Dunk - The Language of Sports 29. Fooling Around - The Language of Love 30. Gung Ho - The Language of War 31. Filibustering - The Language of Politics 32. LOL - The Language of the Internet 33. #$@%! - Forbidden Words 34. Couldn't (or Could) Care Less 35. Musquirt and Other Lexical Gaps 36. Playing Fast and Loose with Words

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