The story of Wolf Shafer and how he came to discover the meaning of life by attending a years worth of funerals

This work undertakes the presentation of salient features of an encyclopedic subject in a more or less condensed fashion. The importance of the study of heating and illumination is thought to be its contribution to the history of culture as connected with the inventiveness displayed by man in the adaptation of the primary natural key force nearest to his needs in all the earlier stages of progress. The history also suggests the intellectual, esthetic, and religious reactions marking the several stages of culture gradually attained by man.

The Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English is a revised and expanded edition of the Weatherford Award–winning Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English, published in 2005 and known in Appalachian studies circles as the most comprehensive reference work dedicated to Appalachian vernacular and linguistic practice. Editors Michael B. Montgomery and Jennifer K. N. Heinmiller document the variety of English used in parts of eight states, ranging from West Virginia to Georgia—an expansion of the first edition's geography, which was limited primarily to North Carolina and Tennessee—and include over 10,000 entries drawn from over 2,200 sources. The entries include approximately 35,000 citations to provide the reader with historical context, meaning, and usage. Around 1,600 of those examples are from letters written by Civil War soldiers and their family members, and another 4,000 are taken from regional oral history recordings. Decades in the making, the Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English surpasses the original by thousands of entries. There is no work of this magnitude available that so completely illustrates the rich language of the Smoky Mountains and Southern Appalachia.