Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} There's a Word for It The Explosion of the American Language Since 1900 by Sol Steinmetz SOL STEINMETZ (Sol Steinmetz) More editions of Dictionary of Jewish Usage: A Guide to the Use of Jewish Terms: Dictionary of Jewish Usage: A Guide to the Use of Jewish Terms: ISBN 9780742543874 (978-0-7425-4387-4) Hardcover, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005 The Dictionary of Jewish Usage: A Popular Guide to the Use of Jewish Terms: ISBN 9780765762061 (978-0-7657- 6206-1) Hardcover, Jason Aronson Inc, 2015. Founded in 1997, BookFinder.com has become a leading book price comparison site: Find and compare hundreds of millions of new books, used books, rare books and out of print books from over 100,000 booksellers and 60+ websites worldwide. Baby boomer. The term baby boomer most commonly refers to people born during the years 1946 to 1964 worldwide. [1] [2] In Canada it is anyone born between 1960 and 1980. [3] Australia identifies baby boomers as those born between 1946 and 1961. [3] Generally, after 1960 the birth rate started falling. [4] In 1951, Sylvia F. Porter, a columnist for the New York Post, first used the term baby boom for the rapid rise in birthrate after Word War II. [5] Contents. Economic impact. From 1945 to 1964 about seventy-seven million babies were born in the United States. [6] In the 1950s baby boomers bought Mouse-ear hats after they watched "The Mickey Mouse Club". They danced to rock and roll and idolized singers like Elvis Presley. Hula hoops and Barbie dolls were wildly popular. [7] By the 1960s many baby boomers were teenagers. They spent nearly $20 million on things including food, clothing, and recorded music. [8] Businesses were eager to find ways to meet their demands. By the 1970s entire industries were changing because of baby boomers. [8] Aging and end-of-life issues. In 1998 the baby boomers began to discuss about their end-of-life issues; but many commentators think they have became burdens for their children and society [9] . According to the 2011 Associated Press and LifeGoesStrong.com surveys: 60% lost value in investments because of the economic crisis 42% are delaying retirement 25% claim they will never retire (currently still working) [10] Baby boomer today. The oldest baby boomers were 67 years old in 2013 and one in five Americans will be 65 years old in 2030. Many people believe they will become a stress on social welfare systems. [11] Can’t think of the right word? This book will reassure you. You may know that I’m a recovering English major, always fighting my addiction to anything literary. That’s why this book—There’s A Word For It by Sol Steinmetz—appeals to me. The subtitle, “The Explosion of the American Language Since 1900” had me at hello. Mr. Steinmetz, well-known in English language circles as an accomplished lexicographer, has published more than 35 dictionaries and reference books. In this one, he chronicles the development of new words and phrases in the English language from 1900 to 2000. How many words? At the end of the 19th Century, the English language contained about 90,000 words. One hundred years later, there were nearly 500,000. Words are formed in many ways. Most are “native coinages, words created by well-established processes like back-formation (baby-sit from baby-sitter), clipping or shortening (condo from condominium, nuke from nuclear), contraction (helluva from hell of a), blending (smog from smoke and fog), derivation (televiewer, telecast, telegenic) and compounding (barfly, busywork).” In addition, many new words—like garage, limousine and daiquiri—are borrowed from foreign languages. Mr. Steinmetz highlights the most important words coined in each decade of the 20th Century. As a result, For example, the 1920s brought us words like bitchy and mass media, the 1950s spawned academia and teleprompter and the 1990s generated spam and smackdown. I find this fascinating, but if you’re not a word geek, this review may be all you need. There's a Word for It. Word geeks (1984), rejoice! Crack open these covers and immerse yourself in a mind-expanding (1963) compendium of the new words (or new meanings of words) that have sprung from American life to ignite the most vital, inventive, fruitful, and A-OK (1961) lexicographical Big Bang (1950) since the first no-brow (1922) Neanderthal grunted meaningfully. From the turn of the twentieth century to today, our language has grown from around 90,000 new words to some 500,000—at least, that’s today’s best guesstimate (1936). What accounts for this quantum leap (1924)? In There’s a Word for It, language expert Sol Steinmetz takes us on a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (1949) joyride (1908) through our nation’s cultural history, as seen through the neato (1951) words and terms we’ve invented to describe it all. From the quaintly genteel days of the 1900s (when we first heard words such as nickelodeon, escalator, and, believe it or not, Ms.) through the Roaring Twenties (the time of flappers, jalopies, and bootleg booze) to the postwar ’50s (the years of rock ’n’ roll, beatniks, and blast-offs) and into the new millennium (with its blogs, Google, and Obamamania), this feast for word lovers is a boffo (1934) celebration of linguistic esoterica (1929). In chapters organized by decade, each with a lively and informative narrative of the life and language of the time, along with year-by-year lists of words that were making their first appearance, There’s a Word for It reveals how the American culture contributed to the evolution and expansion of the English language and vice versa. Clearly, it’s must-reading (1940). And not to disparage any of the umpteen (1918) other language books on the shelf—though they have their share of hokum (1917) and gobbledygook (1944)—but this one truly is the bee’s knees and the cat’s pajamas (1920s). Sol Steinmetz, an Expert on Language, Dies at 80. Sol Steinmetz, a lexicographer, author and tenured member of Olbom ( n., abbrev. , < On Language’s Board of Octogenarian Mentors), whose opinions on matters semantical, grammatical and etymological were widely sought by the news media, died on Oct. 13 in Manhattan. He was 80 and lived in New Rochelle, N.Y. The cause was pneumonia, his wife, Tzipora, said. Writing in The New York Times in 2006, William Safire, who knew from language mavens, called Mr. Steinmetz a “lexical supermaven,” an accolade that in two scant words draws exuberantly on Greek, Latin, Yiddish and Hebrew. (“Maven,” Yiddish for cognoscente, derives from the Hebrew noun mevin , “one who knows.”) There are hundreds of thousands of words in English, and Mr. Steinmetz seemed to have his finger on each of them. Over the years, he edited a spate of dictionaries for various publishers; for abour five years, until his retirement in the mid-1990s, he was the executive editor of the dictionary division of Random House. There, he edited the Random House Webster’s College Dictionary(Random House, 1991), among others. An ordained rabbi, Mr. Steinmetz was a particular authority on Yiddish, in all its kvetchy beauty. His books on the subject include “Yiddish and English: A Century of Yiddish in America” (University of Alabama, 1986) and “Meshuggenary: Celebrating the World of Yiddish” (Simon & Schuster, 2002; with Payson R. Stevens and Charles M. Levine). Mr. Steinmetz was a keen etymologist. In interviews and his own writings, he expounded ardently on the pedigrees of words like “klutz” (from Middle High German klotz , “block, log,” via Yiddish) and “clone” (from the Greek klon , “twig”), which entered English as a noun in 1903. He was also a master of the first citation, scouring centuries of literature and decades of the airwaves to determine precisely when a particular word or phrase made its debut. “Suit,” in the sense of a bureaucrat, for instance, he traced to the television show “Cagney and Lacey” in 1982. Every book in the Steinmetz home was rife with underlining, Ms. Steinmetz said. To a broad public, Mr. Steinmetz was perhaps best known as a longtime member of Olbom ( first citation: 1992, W. Safire, N.Y. Times Mag. ), the band of advisers to Mr. Safire’s On Language column in The Times Magazine. Mr. Safire, who wrote the column from 1979 until shortly before his death last year, quoted Mr. Steinmetz scores of times. Sol Steinmetz was born in Budapest on July 29, 1930; his surname is the Yiddish word for stonemason. The family managed to leave Hungary before the outbreak of World War II, traveling first to the Dominican Republic and later to Venezuela. At 16, the young Mr. Steinmetz settled in New York. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Yeshiva University, from which he also took rabbinic ordination. Afterward, he studied linguistics at Columbia with the eminent Yiddishist Uriel Weinreich. During this period Mr. Steinmetz, who had a fine tenor voice, supported himself by working as a cantor. In 1955 Mr. Steinmetz married Tzipora Mandel — tzipora is Hebrew for sparrow, mandel Yiddish for almond — and later left graduate school for a job as a pulpit rabbi in Media, Pa. Mr. Steinmetz began work as a lexicographer in the late 1950s, when he joined the staff of Merriam-Webster. He was later an editor at Clarence L. Barnhart, a dictionary publisher, before joining Random House. Besides his wife, Mr. Steinmetz’s survivors include a brother, Efry; two sisters, Judith and Chava; and three sons, Jacob, Abraham and Steven. In an event reported in the news media, one of Mr. Steinmetz’s 12 grandchildren, his grandson Amichai, disappeared last year while trekking in the Himalayas. He has not been found, despite a continuing search. Mr. Steinmetz is also survived by two great-grandchildren. In newspaper obituaries, it was long customary to lavish praise on the subjects, noting laudable traits of character. In Mr. Steinmetz’s case, one such trait is worthy of mention even today. “He never had a bad word to say about anyone,” said Jesse Sheidlower, the editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary and a former protégé. “And he knew a lot of bad words.”