Anatoly Liberman. 2022. Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms (2024)

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Anatoly

Liberman

.

2022

.

Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms

Minneapolis

:

University of Minnesota Press

.

xi + 322

pages. ISBN 978-1-5179-1412-7 paperback. Price 22.95 USD.

M Lynne Murphy

University of Sussex

,

United Kingdom

m.l.murphy@sussex.ac.uk

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International Journal of Lexicography, ecae006, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijl/ecae006

Published:

13 April 2024

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What to do, lexicographically, with English idioms? The category is huge, diverse, variable, difficult to categorise, and a pain in the neck to organise. I suppose what one does is give the problem to Anatoly Liberman. The title and subtitle of his new book, Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms, was no doubt chosen to appeal to a general audience, but it misleads. This is not simply a dictionary of what English idioms mean (as would be helpful to an English learner). It is a dictionary of idiom history. In her overview of etymological dictionaries, Éva Buchi noted this gap in coverage: ‘As for idioms, they often completely lack any etymological analysis, the worst being pragmatemes like English oh, boy!’ (2016: 344). The Oxford English Dictionary reveals that lexicographic bias against idioms, defining etymology as ‘the branch of linguistics which deals with determining the origins of words’ [emphasis added]. But Buchi goes on to identify Liberman’s Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology (2007), a dictionary with only 55 entries, as an exception to this rule. In this book, Liberman continues this work and makes it accessible to a broad audience.

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