Itemize Appertaining To Books Filthy English: The How, Why, When and What of Everyday Swearing
| Title | : | Filthy English: The How, Why, When and What of Everyday Swearing |
| Author | : | Peter Silverton |
| Book Format | : | Hardcover |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 314 pages |
| Published | : | December 1st 2009 by Portobello Books |
| Categories | : | Nonfiction. Humanities. Language. History. Humor. Reference |
Peter Silverton
Hardcover | Pages: 314 pages Rating: 3.51 | 235 Users | 26 Reviews
Rendition Supposing Books Filthy English: The How, Why, When and What of Everyday Swearing
I am not quite sure what this book wants to be. For a serious linguistic paper, it is not in-depth enough and relies too much on anecdotal evidence and not enough on actual research. For a typical popular science book that is supposed to appeal to people with no previous knowledge of linguistics, it is far too dry and consists of too many lists. There are just long lists of dates detailing which dictionary added which swear word when and even longer lists of what different things mean in other languages.Those lead to another problem. I can obviously only judge the German ones but what the author claims is just wrong. In one chapter he writes that Fünf gegen Einen (Five against One) was German slang for masturbation. I never heard that one and a quick survey among my (online)friends brought no results either. It’s possibly something regional or (more likely) terribly out of date but it’s definitely nothing as omnipresent as the English wanking to which he compares it (that would be wichsen just in case you need to know). Later he describes Schweinehund (pig-dog) as one of the worst German swears which again is wrong. It can be used as an insult but rarely is (your “inner pig-dog” is that voice that tells you that you rather stay lazily at home and watch TV instead of doing sports or some work). I can’t say much about the other languages – except that he has the oddest way to explain Russian spelling and I only understood it because I re-read the passage repeatedly and knew enough Russian to eventually get what he was trying to say – but it does not give me much confidence that the passages on other languages are better. It is understandable that it might not be that easy to find native speakers who are happy to talk about swearing but I’m wondering anyway why a book that’s called Filthy English needs that much information about non-English swearing.
Now I am trusting the author to at least know his own language so I won’t question the claims he makes about English and one could simply ignore everything about foreign languages. However, that still leaves you with a quite boring book. As mentioned a lot of it are just lists of the first appearances of various words in print (which is actually somewhat interesting) and very extensive lists of which dictionaries first printed fuck or wanker when (which really isn’t at least not in that much detail). The stories about how people reacted to the first fuck etc. in a newspaper, on TV or on a record again are quite intriguing but the author’s personal anecdotes about his experiences with swearing are mostly too drawn out (and full of self-important name-dropping).
DNF at 60% .
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| ISBN: | 1846271681 (ISBN13: 9781846271687) |
| Edition Language: | English |
Rating Appertaining To Books Filthy English: The How, Why, When and What of Everyday Swearing
Ratings: 3.51 From 235 Users | 26 ReviewsEvaluate Appertaining To Books Filthy English: The How, Why, When and What of Everyday Swearing
I am not quite sure what this book wants to be. For a serious linguistic paper, it is not in-depth enough and relies too much on anecdotal evidence and not enough on actual research. For a typical popular science book that is supposed to appeal to people with no previous knowledge of linguistics, it is far too dry and consists of too many lists. There are just long lists of dates detailing which dictionary added which swear word when and even longer lists of what different things mean in otherA good read for all those who like swearing and where the word came from
The cover makes this look like it's gonna be the light-hearted, bite-sized sort of non-fiction that I read when my brain can't take fiction and I just want to learn something without trying too hard. It's not. It's quite an academic work, with a lot of detail and a lot of footnotes -- I don't know what someone who actually does linguistics would think of it, but for me (a lowly literature postgrad student) it was kind of boring after a while. As far as I can tell it's well-researched, but it's
seemed entertaining and interesting at first, but the sheer number of (easily avoidable) errors in examples from the german language made me completely lose trust in the research quality. still useful if you want to improve the quality of your english cursing, i suppose.
First book of my 'book a week' project for 2014. Interesting, informative and unsurprisingly quite rude. By the end I was a Title sick of swear words!
Interesting and entertaining. Reccomend!
The parts about this book that actually talked about swearing were interesting - they covered etymology, why we swear, international curses, censorship and all sorts of expletive filled entries. I was frequently irritated, however, by the author's habit of digressing either to cover something totally irrelevant to the subject or to offer up his own autobiographical experiences in far too much detail. So the book lost a star for the inability of Silverton to stick to the fucking subject.
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