Words of a Feather: A Humorous Puzzlement of Etymological Pairs - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Murray Suid is the author of more than 30 books for students, teachers, and writers. He is the cofounder of WritingDoctor.com, an online writing service.

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Dazzle your friends and family with your knowledge of word origins!

What's the connection between maneuver and manure? Between glamour and grammar? Anger and angina? At first glance, these words seem to have nothing in common, but in fact they are Words of a Feather, connected by their origins. This cleverly entertaining book explores the shared histories of 150 word pairs (called "dual etymologies") to give language lovers of all ages a fun and powerful vocabulary-building education that's sure to impress.

Adversary & Advertisement:

Both share the same root for "turn." An adversary is someone you don't want to turn away from, lest he shoot you in the back. An advertisement makes you turn toward it, so it can sell you something.

Affluence & Influence:

It's all about "flow." The affluent have a steady flow of cash; the influential have power flow. And if you're Bill Gates, you've got it all.

Flatulence & Inflation:

Both share the Latin flare, which means "to blow," although with inflate, the "wind" is incoming, a crucial difference.

Do you long for the linguistic? Does etymology excite you? If you've ever sat and pondered the mysterious connections between words such as mortgage and mortician, dandelion and dentist, or flatulence and inflation, then this is the book you've been waiting for.

In this fascinating collection of 150 linguistic riddles, author Murray Suid turns his love of lexicology to "doublets," pairs of words that can be traced back to a common ancestor. With wit and wonder, he uncovers examples from a variety of fields, including the performing arts (ad-lib and libido), economics (affluence and influence), science (cosmos and cosmetics), sports (champion and champagne), and religion (God and gossip). With each doublet, Murray provides an informative and entertaining mini-essay that traces the etymology of the pair back to its common roots, along the way encountering words from Old English, French, German, Latin, Greek, and the many other world languages that have given English the most vast vocabulary on earth. You'll also find Suid's Word Factory, an easy-to-follow overview of various word-forming processes--for example, metathesis, which means switching around letters (dirt was originally drit; butterfly came from the phrase flutter by).

Before you know it, you'll be making your own etymological discoveries and the next time you're at a party or sitting around the dinner table, you'll be turning heads with questions like, "Hey, can you guess the relationship between rectitude and rectum?"