When a Loose Cannon Flogs a Dead Horse There's the Devil to Pay: Seafaring Words in Everyday Speech: Ever wondered about the origin of big-wig, flogging a dead horse, mind your P's and Q's, or three sheets to the wind? These commonly used colloquialisms all have nautical backgrounds and entertaining histories. This collection of more than 250 of these fascinating words and phrases also includes yarns, legends, superstitions, weather lore, poetry, rhymes, songs, and more.

Devious Derivations: In Devious Derivations, word maven Hugh Rawson brings you a marvelously entertaining roundup of 1,000 spurious etymologies, then enlightens you with their genuine counterparts. Some wiseacre (which, by the way, has nothing to do with a land measure) may have told you that a tip is something you give to a waiter "To Insure Promptness," or that James I once knighted a remarkable side of beef, saying "Arise, Sir Loin," but like hundreds of oft-repeated accounts of word origins, they're just too good to be true. People, it seems, are etymologizing creatures, and if a certain lexical lineage is unclear, they are sure to invent one.

The Fascinating Origins of Everyday Words: The Fascinating Origins of Everyday Words gives the detailed origins of a wide variety of English words.

The Language Instinct: In this classic study, the world's leading expert on language and the mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about languages: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it envolved. With wit, erudition, and deft use it everyday examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution like web spinning in spiders or sonar bats.

Word Mysteries and Histories: Delightful reading for all lovers of the language, animated by Barry Moser's haunting wood engravings. This superb collection of 500 English word origins is the perfect book for browsers, students and word aficionados. 34 woodcut illustrations.

Dictionary of Word Origins: The average English speaker knows approximately 50,000 words -- almost 25 times more words than there are stars visible in the night sky. The Dictionary of Word Origins uncovers the often surprising connections between words. In more than 8,000 entries, the dictionary reveals the origins of and links between words like beef and cow, secret and crime, flour and pollen, imbecile and bacteria, plankton and complain. Written in a clear and informative style, the Dictionary of Word Origins shows how English today has developed from its Indo-European origins and how diverse influences on the language have intermingled. This highly browsable reference also looks at the many new words and coinages that enter the language every year.

The Compact Oxford English Dictionary: Proper words in their proper places -- and a good many improper ones, too! If the OED's many obsolete definitions tend to be the most enjoyable -- shuff is dialect for "shy," dolt was once upon a time a verb as well, meaning "to befool" -- everyday idiosyncrasies still abound. But, for instance, occupies nine columns of text, and who would wish a single line away? There's also the sublime pleasure of trawling through the sea of relevant quotations. The OED's initial team of "voluntary readers" was asked to cite as many phrases as possible for both archaic and ordinary terms. None seems to have found this remotely arduous, and we now reap the ubiquitous ("present or appearing everywhere; omnipresent") rewards. This huge venture is a labor of lore, love, and good humor.

Salty Dog Talk: The Nautical Origins of Everyday Expressions: A charming etymology for all salty-minded people. Explains the fascinating ship-board beginnings of over 200 words and expressions, with the author's own delightful cartoons.

A Sea of Words: This comprehensive lexicon provides definitions of nautical terms, historical entries describing the people and political events that shaped the period, and detailed explanations of the scientific, medical, and biblical references that appear in the novels.

The Secret Lives of Words: Over the centuries, thousands of our words have been so twisted, tangled, misused, and muddled that their original meanings have been obscured. You'll be surprised to learn that table napkins were once made of and referred to as asbestos, a cloud was once a hill, and lasagna could be literally translated as chamberpot pasta. In The Secret Lives of Words, acclaimed author and stylist Paul West fulfills a personal odyssey to seek out the elusive roots of these and a few hundred other of his favorite words, from abracadabra to zoot suit. Derived from handwritten notebooks, West chronicles the tortuous travels of words across continents and through cultures in this Antiques Road Show approach to etymology. A delight in both form and content, West's collection will capture the attention of word enthusiasts, speakers, writers, thinkers, and readers around the globe.

Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang: A fascinating mixture of the clever, the colorful, the crude, and the coarse, this first historical dictionary to be devoted exclusively to American slang has been in progress for more than two decades. In his excellent 27-page introduction, Lighter, a research associate in the English department of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, traces the historical development of slang in the English language and discusses its sociological and cultural aspects. Following the introduction, Lighter provides a useful, annotated bibliography of significant books and articles dealing with American slang and an admirably thorough guide to the dictionary.

America in So Many Words: This book presents a unique historical view of American English. It chronicles year by year the contributions Americans have made to the vocabulary of English and the words Americans have embraced through the evolution of the nation. For important years from the settlement of Jamestown until 1750, and for every year from 1750 through 1998, a prominent word is analyzed and discussed in its historical context. The result is a fascinating survey of American linguistic culture through past centuries. The authors -- both lifelong students of American English -- bring great depth of understanding to these key words that have made America, and American English, what they are today.