Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (Brewer's S.) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0304348694 ISBN 13: 9780304348695

Publisher: Weidenfeld Nicolson Illustrated, 1996

Synopsis

A reference guide containing information about thousands of phrases and expressions not normally covered by conventional dictionaries. New etymological material about word and phrase histories is included, and there are entries on people and events from mythology, the bible, and literature.

About this title

Review:

An early highlight of this fully revised millennium edition of Brewer's is Terry Pratchett's short, sweetly ironic preface. It's entirely appropriate, given Brewer's has been the bread-and-butter of curious, self-educated working men and women for 130 years, and that this decade's great demotic writer should be invited to watch the dust settle on yet another deposit of curious knowledge. ("It's an education in itself, seeing [the Fab Four] take their place with old Roman senators and mythological fauna ... ").

Brewer's is famously, fabulously useless. There is not the remotest possibility that it contains anything you might actually be looking up at the time. In this, it closely resembles that great modern intellectual irritant, the World Wide Web. Where it bests the upstart Web is in its wit, its erudition and in its disposability. Mind you, frustrated users should wield the new edition with caution. Adrian Room has introduced French jargon, inkhorn literary terms and many more historical and fictional characters to the familiar "alms-basket of words".

But it is through the number of extra phrases and quotations that Room truly distinguishes this edition--and who can resist passages of verse like the one which accompanies a new entry for Technogamia, a 1618 play of such mind-crushing tediousness that James I "made several efforts to leave after sitting out the first two acts"? By complete contrast, there's never a dull moment to be had with this great, daft, pointless, wonderful brick of a book. --Simon Ings

Review:

the first book I ever bought for myself. It cost 10s and 6d which is a little over 50p. I've twice been asked to write introductions for later editions, which is like some little Scottish schoolboy being a caddy at St Andrews and later on being invited as a champion golfer (Terry Pratchett THE GUARDIAN - From the Pieces of Me feature)

I still feel affection for old Brewer, the "dictionary of last resort". Want to know how to write in Ogham? Or what a hymen really is? (Simon Winchester THE WEEK)

An invaluable reference tool of extraordinary breadth. (FAMILY HISTORY MONTHLY)

About this edition

• Publisher: Weidenfeld Nicolson Illustrated
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0304348694
• ISBN 13: 9780304348695
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 1204
• Editor: Brewer Ebenezer Cobham