My thanks to everybody who has tested my mettle by asking questions; my apologies to the many hundreds in the past decade who have asked but not been answered, either because there just aren’t enough hours in the day or, sadly, because I can’t find anything useful to say.
Among research sources, primary acknowledgement must be made to the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary – that incomparable repository of knowledge about the way that the English language has evolved over 1,500 years. Though I’ve contributed to it, my debt to it is far greater than any help of mine can repay. Through a splendid British scheme, my local library gives me free access to the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography to check information about historical figures. Much ill-informed criticism is made of the online world, but for me it has long since proved a wondrous cornucopia of specialist knowledge unrivalled in human history; in particular, dozens of websites run by enthusiastic and knowledgeable organizations and individuals have provided information on many subjects relating to this book.
No doubt, as many readers have down the years, you will be wondering how I found the eclectic mixture of illustrative quotations in this book, some of which have even improved our state of knowledge of the history of words and phrases. I subscribe to several current and historical online newspaper archives and I’ve made extensive use of free resources, such as those of the Internet Archive, Wikipedia, Making of America, Old Bailey trial transcripts, the British Library Online Newspaper Archive, the Google newspaper archive and Google Books, as well as the archives of many individual newspapers. An important resource has been the digitized collection of books, currently more than 27,000 and increasing every week, that have been prepared by the volunteers of Project Gutenberg, which gives access to much of the standard canon of English literature. The Shakespearean quotations are as they appear in the RSC Shakespeare. Bibliographical details have been checked against the online catalogues of the British Library, the Library of Congress and the Australian National Library.
Special thanks go to my commissioning editor at Penguin, Georgina Laycock, an enthusiastic supporter of this work while remaining an objective critic of its execution, to copy editor Lindsay Murray, project editor Ruth Stimson and to Helen Conford; to John Smith, for supplying me with a copy of his article, ‘Foxes’ Weddings’, from which I have borrowed in answering the question about monkey’s wedding; to Julane Marx of Los Angeles, who has for many years cheerfully added to her full-time job and looking after a family the weekly chore of checking my World Wide Words newsletters, particularly for errors concerning American life, and who has read and commented on the text; to the members of the American Dialect Society, whose discussions and investigations into the language of the US have been of considerable help; to the hundreds of knowledgeable readers of the World Wide Words newsletter and website – too many to name – who down the years have put me straight when my attempts at explaining some specialist point or arcane matter have gone astray; and of course to my wife, who has coped with a husband forever distracted while he mentally works out the best way to answer some tricky query.
Michael Quinion
Thornbury, South Gloucestershire.
November 2008.