📚English Prepositions: Their Meanings and Uses
This book provides an integrated account of the main prepositions of English, outlining their various forms and illustrating contrastive senses. The three chapters in Part I delineate grammatical contexts of occurrence and special uses, exploring grammatical roles, phrasal verbs, and prepositional verbs respectively. In Part II, each chapter deals with a set of related prepositions, providing an integrated account of the meanings for each, and explaining how these are linked to their grammatical properties. There are two chapters on relational prepositions - principally <em>of</em>, <em>for</em>, <em>by</em>, and <em>with</em> - which have only minor reference to space or time. These are followed by seven chapters on prepositions whose basic meaning is spatial, with many extensions to abstract senses, and one that ties together the varied ways through which prepositions deal with time. The final chapter outlines how some people have attempted to prescribe how language should be used; it also covers dialect variation, foreign learners' errors, and prospects for the future. The book is written in Dixon's accustomed style - clear and well-organized, with easy-to-understand explanations, and with limited use of technical terms. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of the English language, including instructors of English as a second language.
Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms by Anatoly Liberman
Three centuries of English idioms—their unusual origins and unexpected interpretations
To pay through the nose. Raining cats and dogs. By hook or by crook. Curry favor. Drink like a fish. Eat crow. We hear such phrases every day, but this book is the first truly all-encompassing etymological guide to both their meanings and origins. Spanning more than three centuries, Take My Word for It is a fascinating, one-of-a-kind window into the surprisingly short history of idioms in English. Widely known for his studies of word origins, Anatoly Liberman explains more than one thousand idioms, both popular and obscure, occurring in both American and British standard English and including many regional expressions.
The origins, and even the precise meaning, of most idioms are often obscure and lost in history.
SIMILES DICTIONARY
Whether it invokes hard work or merely a hen-house, a good simile is like a good picture - it's worth a thousand words.
Packed with more than 16,000 imaginative, colorful phrases-from "abandoned as a used Kleenex" to "quiet as an eel swimming in oil"- the Similes Dictionary will help any politician, writer, or lover of language find just the right saying, be it original or banal, verbose or succinct.
Citing more than 2,000 sources-from the Bible, Socrates, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and H. L. Mencken to popular movies, music, and television shows - the Similes Dictionary covers hundreds of subjects broken into thematic categories that include topics such as virtue, anger, age, ambition, importance, and youth, helping you find the fitting phrase quickly and easily. Perfect for setting the atmosphere, making a point, or helping spin a tale with economy, intelligence, and ingenuity, the vivid comparisons found in this collection will inspire anyone.
