1066 And All That: New Phrase Book Rewrites English

A former teacher of English has written a phrase book with a difference: In Hastings, 1066 - Words We'd Wield if We'd Won, David Cowley has used an extensive knowledge of the language to show a modern English stripped of Norman-French, with its original Anglo-Saxon words intact.

The results are a mix of the startlingly different and surprisingly familiar, as these examples show:

May I ask a question? - May I ask a frayn?
Think positively! - Think winly!
Such impatience! - Such unthild!
With little modesty - With little shamefastness
Making progress - Making forthship
Be discrete - Be sidely
A duty to be done - An oughting to be done
A precious heritage - A dearworth yearve
The court believed you were innocent of the accusation - The hove believed you to be unsinny of the wraying
Peace agreement - Frith thwearing

Cowley sees fun and serious sides to the work: "Hastings meant the English elite and official use of Old English were swept aside by the Normans. French words ousted many English ones, so we've ended up speaking and even thinking differently. There's a fun element in pretending we won at Hastings, but the alternative sayings can really make you think it's a pity we lost that way of expressing things."

Hastings, 1066 - Words We'd Wield if We'd Won, Bright Pen Books, 51 pages, RRP £3.99
ISBN 978-0-7552-1376-4


http://www.authorsonline.co.uk/book/1125/Hastings+1066+-+Words+We'd+Wield+If+We'd+Won/

(EDITOR: This will make an absolutely first rate stocking filler, this Christmas)

Totally Weird and Wonderful Words!

Totally Weird and Wonderful Words is a book compiled and edited by Erin McKean, with rather splendid illustrations by Roz Chast and Danny Shanahan.

The book is published in paperback by the OUP at $14.95. (That's about £8.00) Why the OUP chose to put only the Dollar price on the cover is anyone's guess. As is the decision by the OUP to employ American English spelling in their books, but please do not get me started on THAT one!

As you would expect, the book is a mixture of odd, bizarre and entertaining words.

Is it a draffsack of odd and old words?

Or a logomachy, perhaps?

Read this book and you will discover words that you probably never even had the vaguest idea even existed.

Learn that a loon-slatt was a Scottish coin, that a lolling-lobby was a derisive term for a monk, that a gallinipper is a large mosquito, that dromaeogathous means having the palate of an emu, that dretch means to trouble in sleep, or to be troubled in sleep.

If someone has a fear of the dark it could be said that they are suffering from nyctophobia.

The book is a lot of fun and should while away the time should you be feeling somewhat wabbit.

Draffsack = a bag of garbage

Logomachy = fighting about words

wabbit = A Scottish word meaning exhausted or slightly unwell