It’s Fun to Get Stuff in the Mail

I obtained two more reference books that I thought would be useful for this class and useful in my writing process today in the mail.

Bryson. B. 2008. Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors. Broadway Books. New York

Hendrickson R. 2008. Encylopedia of Word and Phrase Origins 4th Edition. Checkmark Books. New York

I’ve only browsed through them for about ten minutes each, and find them to be quite interesting tools that I can reference should the need occur. I found phrase origins from “the almighty dollar” by Washington Irving first published in his sketch “The Creole Village” in 1836 to “tooth and nail” being the Latin equivalent phrase of “toto corpora atque omibus ungulis”- with all the body and every nail and the French phrase, “bec et ungles”- beak and talons, all meaning the same thing , to fight with tooth and nails, biting and scratching, with weapons, with all the powers at one’s command. These will be good sources of information for me when writing different types of papers for school. Don’t you wish you had one! My wife did, so now I have a carrot to wave in front of her to start writing again, she’s retired and needs things to do to keep her busy and out of trouble to fill up the time left over from retirement. Retire- comes from the French term 'retirer' meaning to draw back, to draw out, endure and unfortunately partially from a derivative of Martyr, possibly because martyrs were often drawn out of "the rack" almost beyond the limits of human endurance.Yeeech.

Wasn't that an interesting tidbit of knowledge? This is going to be fun.