Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction to the Weedy Traits of the English Language
- Our Lexical Weeds: the World of Jargon, Slang and Euphemism
- More Lexical Weeds: Word Origins and Meaning Shifts
- Our Grammatical Weeds
- Weeds in Our Sounds and Spelling
- The Truly Nasty Weeds of the English Language?
- W(h)ither Our Weeds?
- Bibliography
- List of Interesting Words
Our Lexical Weeds: the World of Jargon, Slang and Euphemism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction to the Weedy Traits of the English Language
- Our Lexical Weeds: the World of Jargon, Slang and Euphemism
- More Lexical Weeds: Word Origins and Meaning Shifts
- Our Grammatical Weeds
- Weeds in Our Sounds and Spelling
- The Truly Nasty Weeds of the English Language?
- W(h)ither Our Weeds?
- Bibliography
- List of Interesting Words
Summary
Some time ago I blundered once again … You see, it happened while I was sowing the last of the seeds in a row of peas. As I bent to retrieve some I had dropped, there in front of my horrified eyes, was a small clump of oxalis.
How this dreadful weed had sneaked into the garden in spite of all my precautions will never be known, but there it was, deceptively pretty, a tiny cluster of soft green, shamrock leaves. That's when the awful mistake was made.
I should have dropped everything and dug it out straight away, in a perfectly normal blind panic, but I didn't.
Peter Cundall Seasonal Tasks for the Practical Australian Gardener 1989Language of special groups
Someone at the University of Melbourne kindly emailed me about the recent seizure by ordinary language of a number of specialist expressions. In particular, he drew my attention to the terms epicentre and ballistic. What disturbed this person was not so much the fact that the wider community was taking up these terms, but the misuse of them. Epicentre, as he pointed out, is a term from geology. In its technical meaning it refers to the true centre of a disturbance – the point from which earthquake waves go out. These days in ordinary language it seems to be acquiring a more general sense of simply ‘middle’. The ABC news, for example, reported the arrest of someone described as being at ‘the epicentre of a drug ring’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Weeds in the Garden of WordsFurther Observations on the Tangled History of the English Language, pp. 14 - 48Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005