BiblioVault - Books about Word Lists

1,000 Signs of Life

Basic ASL for Everyday Conversation

The Editors of Gallaudet University Press

Gallaudet University Press, 2004

Here’s the succinct handbook that will allow everyone to enjoy the beauty and functionality of American Sign Language. 1,000 Signs of Life: Basic ASL for Everyday Conversation illustrates a potpourri of intriguing and entertaining signs that can be grasped quickly and used to communicate with anyone familiar with ASL, deaf or hearing. Organized alphabetically in 17 categories, this handy paperback offers common signs for animals, food, clothes, people, health and body, the time, days of the week, seasons, colors, quantities, transportation and travel, and many more practical topics. Readers also can learn signs for community-related terms, holidays and religion, and for thoughts and emotions, signs that will offer them the opportunity to experience the full potential of ASL.

1,000 Signs of Life begins with a concise introduction to American Sign Language, including how it evolved and how its grammar and syntax work. Complementing this information are categories on signs for adjectives and adverbs, prepositions and locations, question words, and verbs and action words. Interspersed throughout the text are tips for signing, rules of signing etiquette, and engaging anecdotes about Deaf culture, Deaf people, and the Deaf community. 1,000 Signs of Life provides a fun, fast way to learn basic ASL signs and also offers easy-to-follow instructions and hints on how to use them in a variety of everyday situations. It's the perfect streamlined guide for signing ASL.

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Around the World in 80 Words

A Journey through the English Language

Paul Anthony Jones

University of Chicago Press, 2018

What makes a place so memorable that it survives forever in a word? In this captivating round-the-world tour, Paul Anthony Jones acts as your guide through the intriguing stories of how eighty places became immortalized in the English language. You’ll discover why the origins of turkeys, limericks, Brazil nuts, and Panama hats aren’t quite as straightforward as you might presume. If you’ve never heard of the tiny Czech mining town of Jáchymov—or Joachimsthal, as it was known until the late 1800s—you’re not alone, which makes its claim to fame as the origin of the word “dollar” all the more extraordinary. The story of how the Great Dane isn’t all that Danish makes the list, as does the Jordanian mountain whose name has become a byword for a tantalizing glimpse. We’ll also find out what the Philippines has given to your office inbox, what Alaska has given to your liquor cabinet, and how a speech given by a bumbling North Carolinian gave us a word for impenetrable nonsense.

Surprising, entertaining, and illuminating, this is essential reading for armchair travelers and word nerds. Our dictionaries are full of hidden histories, tales, and adventures from all over the world—if you know where to look.

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The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities

A Yearbook of Forgotten Words

Paul Anthony Jones

University of Chicago Press, 2019

Open The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities and you’ll find both a word and a day to remember, every day of the year. Each day has its own dedicated entry, on which a curious or notable event—and an equally curious or notable word—are explored.
On the day on which flirting was banned in New York City, for instance, you’ll discover why to “sheep’s-eye” someone once meant to look at them amorously. On the day on which a disillusioned San Franciscan declared himself Emperor of the United States, you’ll find the word “mamamouchi,” a term for people who consider themselves more important than they truly are. And on the day on which George Frideric Handel completed his 259-page Messiah after twenty-four days of frenzied work, you’ll see why a French loanword, literally meaning “a small wooden barrow,” is used to refer to an intense period of work undertaken to meet a deadline.

The English language is vast enough to supply us with a word for every occasion—and this linguistic “wunderkammer” is here to prove precisely that. So whatever date this book has found its way into your hands, there’s an entire year’s worth of linguistic curiosities waiting to be found.

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A Concordance to Finnegans Wake

Clive Hart

University of Minnesota Press, 1963

A Concordance to Finnegans Wake was first published in 1963. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This concordance, the first full-scale work dealing with the language of James Joyce's last period, provides a finding-list and analytical index for his last work, Finnegans Wake. There are three parts: the first consisting of a complete alphabetical index to the vocabulary of Finnegans Wake,the second comprising a list of syllabifications (showing the inner parts of compound words), and the third providing a list of some 10,000 English words suggested by Joycean distortions.

The primary word-index, similar in most respects to those which have already been published for Joyce's Ulysses and Stephen Hero, list in alphabetical order all of the 63,924 different words which make up the vocabulary of Finnegans Wake and provides page-line references for every occurrence of all but a small handful of the most common English words. Except for punctuation marks, every typographical unit in the book is accounted for, and each is listed just as it appears in the text.

The second on syllabification lists in alphabetical order the inner parts of over 10,000 complex words in Finnegans Wake which are built up out of simpler elements and which would be impossible to find from the primary index alone.

In the last section, called "Overtones," the aim is to list the English words suggested by Joyce's puns and distortions. Much information gleaned from the Joycean research of the past decade is gathered together here.

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Critical Terms for Media Studies

Edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen

University of Chicago Press, 2010

Communications, philosophy, film and video, digital culture: media studies straddles an astounding array of fields and disciplines and produces a vocabulary that is in equal parts rigorous and intuitive. Critical Terms for Media Studies defines, and at times, redefines, what this new and hybrid area aims to do, illuminating the key concepts behind its liveliest debates and most dynamic topics.

Part of a larger conversation that engages culture, technology, and politics, this exciting collection of essays explores our most critical language for dealing with the qualities and modes of contemporary media. Edited by two outstanding scholars in the field, W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, the volume features works by a team of distinguished contributors. These essays, commissioned expressly for this volume, are organized into three interrelated groups: “Aesthetics” engages with terms that describe sensory experiences and judgments, “Technology” offers entry into a broad array of technological concepts, and “Society” opens up language describing the systems that allow a medium to function.

A compelling reference work for the twenty-first century and the media that form our experience within it, Critical Terms for Media Studies will engage and deepen any reader’s knowledge of one of our most important new fields.

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