Who Put The Butter In Butterfly? - ... And other Fearless Investigations into Our Illogical Language

David Feldman

Publié par HarperCollins e-books, le 17 mars 2009

224 pages

Résumé

The English language is filled with familiar words that, when one thinks about them, are downright peculiar: cooties, doozies, and heepie-jeebies; finks and funks; mugwumps and muumuus; deep six and cloud nine. There's only one pundit to solve these and other riddles of our spoken tongue: David Feildman, who in his bestselling ImponderablesT book and Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise? has established himself as the unchallenged expert on answering and unanswerable. Word ImponderablesT have always been favorites with Feldman's legions of fans, and in Who Put the Butter in Butterfly? he gets to the source of all the mysteries surrounding our curious vocabulary. Why do we mid our Ps and Qs and not our Vs and Ws? Which Toms lent their names to Peeping Tom, Tom Collins, and tommy gun. How does a Weasel go "pop" -- and why for that matter? And who are the Joneses we're supposed to be keeping up with?Who Put the Butter in Butterfly? is a reference book you can't afford to be without. So don't beat around the bush , and don't wait until the eleventh hour to until the jig is up. This is compulsive reading for anyone incurable curious about the idiosyncrasies fo the language.