Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : SI Grammar and Spelling Lab -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (2577)	5/23/1999 1:55:00 AM
From: jbe	Respond to of 4711

Lather, the dictionary I am thinking of is the magisterial Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (edited by J. E. Lighter, J. Ball, & J. O'Connor). Volume II, covering the letters H-0, came out about a year and a half ago, and received rapturous reviews. I salivated, but the price of $65 for the single volume was too much for my budget, already decimated by Christmas. Here are some tidbits from the reviews (as cited by Amazon.com), to make you salivate: "A landmark publication, at one stroke sweeping its predecessors into the shade....It is one of those rare books that prompts the realization that you have never seen the subject in sharp focus before." -- John A. Simpson, Chief Editor, Oxford English Dictionary "A monumental book." -- The New York Times. "Once again, the dictionary's editor, J.E. Lighter, has done a prodigious research job, giving us both an irreverent glossary of our daily speech and an erudite index of our language's cultural evolution. This is a volume that draws, equally, from Shakespeare and Penthouse, Beckett and Butt-head, the Oxford English Dictionary and Melrose Place. Hunter Thompson, Dr. Seuss and Details magazine are cited for word usage, as are Leeza Gibbons, Larry King and the television cartoon character Dr. Katz." "No one has ever created a scholarly work that is more fun." -- Newsweek "The funniest...work of profound lexicographical slang-scholarship ever published....The book belongs on every patriotic coffee table." -- Nicholson Baker, The New York Review of Books "A browser's joy....an awesome tribute to the American popular imagination." -- The Boston Globe Well? You can now get Volume II from Amazon, for $45. But they don't appear to have Volume I (A-F), although presumably a well-stocked regular bookstore should have it. As for Volume III, who knows when it will be out? If you are impatient, there is another, more modest A-Z dictionary, which Barnes & Nobles sells on-line for $29 (regular price $42): Dictionary of American Slang Eds: Robert L. Chapman, Barbara Ann Kipfer, Harold Wentworth And, if you are too poor, there is always the local library! jbe