A guide to references commonly used in speech and writing. Explains more than 900 allusions. Entries include examples from todays leading media. A must for serious readers, language lovers, and ESL students.

Describes authors, works, and literary terms from all eras and all parts of the world.

This indispensable work is a comprehensive resource offering abundant information that students and general readers of all ages will find clear and to the point. A useful companion to The Facts On File Dictionary of Cultural and Historical Allusions explains the meanings and origins of allusions from the Bible and classical mythology, including Greek, Roman, Norse, Celtic, and Egyptian. It features approximately 2,000 entries, from Abelard and Heloise to Zeus. It covers biblical and mythological figures (Narcissus, Athena, Daniel), places (Mount Olympus, Gesthemane, Elysian Fields), key concepts (doomsday, utopia), and other references with biblical and mythological origins (judgment of Solomon, salt of the earth, patience of Job, labors of Hercules). It also includes a pronunciation key for difficult words or terms; examples of usage; and extensive cross-references.

A reference for the general reader contains concise explanations of the origins of over 1,800 nicknames from contemporary and historical culture referring to historical figures, politicians, athletes, entertainers, places, events, and organizations.

“It takes true brilliance to lift the arid tellings of lexicographic fussing into the readable realm of the thriller and the bodice-ripper….David Skinner has done precisely this, taking a fine story and honing it to popular perfection.” —Simon Winchester, New York Times bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman The captivating, delightful, and surprising story of Merriam Webster’s Third Edition, the dictionary that provoked America’s greatest language controversy. In those days, Webster’s Second was the great gray eminence of American dictionaries, with 600,000 entries and numerous competitors but no rivals. It served as the all-knowing guide to the world of grammar and information, a kind of one-stop reference work. In 1961, Webster’s Third came along and ignited an unprecedented controversy in America’s newspapers, universities, and living rooms. The new dictionary’s editor, Philip Gove, had overhauled Merriam’s long held authoritarian principles to create a reference work that had “no traffic with…artificial notions of correctness or authority. It must be descriptive not prescriptive.” Correct use was determined by how the language was actually spoken, and not by “notions of correctness” set by the learned few. Dwight MacDonald, a formidable American critic and writer, emerged as Webster’s Third’s chief nemesis when in the pages of the New Yorker he likened the new dictionary to the end of civilization.. The Story of Ain’t describes a great cultural shift in America, when the voice of the masses resounded in the highest halls of culture, when the division between highbrow and lowbrow was inalterably blurred, when the humanities and its figureheads were shunted aside by advances in scientific thinking. All the while, Skinner treats the reader to the chippy banter of the controversy’s key players. A dictionary will never again seem as important as it did in 1961.

In this volume Cleanth Brooks pays tribute to the language and literature of the American South. He writes of the language's unique syntax and its celebrated languorous rhythms; of the classical allusions and Addisonian locutions once favored by the gentry; and of the more earthbound eloquence, rooted in the dialect of England's southern lowlands, that is still heard in the speech of the region's plain folk. It is this rich spoken language, Brooks suggests, that has always been the life blood of southern writing. The strong tradition of storytelling in the South is reflected in the tales told by Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus and in the obsessive retellings that structure William Faulkner's novels and stories. But even more crucially, the language of the South--firmly rooted in the land but with a tendency to reach for the heavens above--has shaped the literary concerns and molded the complex visions to be found in the poetry of Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom; the stories of Flannery O'Connor, Peter Taylor, and Eudora Welty; and the novels of Warren, Allen Tate, and Walker Percy.

Entries provide the likely sources for a name; describe historical and mythological backgrounds; examine Shakespeare's presentation of a character or place; and suggest various interpretations of a name. Each entry contains line citations to William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. A guide to the historical, mythological, fictional, and geographic references that appear in Shakespeare's complete plays and poems, covering every name, proper adjective, official title, literary and mystical title, and place name.