Cassells Dictionary Of Word & Phrase Origins; Author: Rees, Nigel; Paperback; Standard Hardcover size

Author: Rees, Nigel
New ed; Paperback; Standard Hardcover size
284 pages
Published: March 2002
Orion Publishing Co
ISBN: 0304362255

Have any idea where the word nerd came from, or twerp? This dictionary starts where ordinary references beg off. *Discover that bad hair day was originated by California teenagers in the early 1990s. *Learn that bikini comes from the name of a Pacific island used in the 1940s for atomic bomb tests. *Learn why a flight data recorder is called a black box--even though it's orange.A new and expanded edition of a fascinating A-Z guide to over 1,200 words and colloquial phrases. Why do we say a person is the spitting image of someone else, or take a rain check? These questions are rarely answered by conventional dictionaries, but this book takes a wide-ranging approach to problems of etymology, challenging a few long-held theories on the way.