As a student of philosophy, I took interest in it. History was also a favorite study. I was an A student in English. I liked to read and write. Creative writing was fun to do. Over the years, as I traveled and worked on ships and construction sites, I developed my manhood, you might say. I matured around men who talked filthy, played the dozen, and told a lot of jokes. Of course, I was influenced by some of this. I picked up on a lot of jokes and old sayings, mostly from older men. Throughout the years, I had remembered quite a few. My friends used to call me a philosopher. I had a saying for everything. Over the years, I realized everyone had picked up their share of sayings as well. I started writing them down because they were so many I couldnt remember them. Then I realized the wisdom in them and came up with the idea to put them in a book form for reference. I felt that some could read this book and be educated by all the wisdom. Where else could you find a collection of so many sayings that will leave you with curiosity, laughter, and wisdom?

The book contains over 1100 words and is intended to be a quick reference guide for the reader of The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings, where old, uncommon and archaic words can be quickly looked up and their meaning made clear. Draught for example occurs 35 times in the text with at least 5 different meanings. It means current of air in one sentence, drinking, or a drink or potion in another, one who is drafted into service in another, to draw or to pull in another and finally the depth a vessel sinks in the water. One needs to know all of the meanings in order to fully understand the text. The words in the first section of each book are arranged in order of appearance in the books. In the last section, the words are arranged alphabetically for ease of finding a particular word without regard to where it is used. Also included is the sentence where the word is used to provide the reader with the contextual setting of the word in the sentence it is used in as an aid to understand the meaning.

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The Longman Anthology of Old English, Old Icelandic and Anglo-Norman Literatures provides a scholarly and accessible introduction to the literature which was the inspiration for many of the heroes of modern popular culture, from The Lord of the Rings to The Chronicles of Narnia, and which set the foundations of the English language and its literature as we know it today. Edited, translated and annotated by the editors of Beowulf and Other Stories, the anthology introduces readers to the rich and varied literature of Britain, Scandinavia and France of the period in and around the Viking Age. Ranging from the Old English epic Beowulf through to the Anglo-Norman texts which heralded the transition Middle English, thematically organised chapters present elegies, eulogies, laments and followed by material on the Viking Wars in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Vikings gods and Icelandic sagas, and a final chapter on early chivalry introduces the new themes and forms which led to Middle English literature, including Arthurian Romances and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Laying out in parallel text format selections from the most important Old English, Old Icelandic and Anglo-Norman works, this anthology presents translated and annotated texts with useful bibliographic references, prefaced by a headnote providing useful background and explanation.

A study of English semantics during the Enlightenment. New words 1650–1800 reflect the new middle-class culture of sociability, commerce, and science. Old mostly obsolete words illuminate the realities of working-class life, exhausting labor, dirt, outrageous sexism, magic, horses, bizarre food.