Reviewed by Carolin Patzelt, University of Bochum

The book analyzes the question whether creolization is a gradual or abrupt process. Dedicated to Jacques Arends, who firmly believed creolization to be gradual, this highly interesting volume represents a collection of seventeen papers that cover a wide range of structural phenomena and languages. The papers are grouped into two sections: Part 1 ‘Linguistic analysis’ and Part 2 ‘Social reconstruction’.

It comes as no surprise that five articles focus on Surinamese creoles, Arend’s main area of expertise. Bettina Migge and Donald Winford argue for internal developments (rather than different substrate and superstrate effects) to account for different expressions of possibility in the Surinamese Maroon creoles and Sranan. Peter Bakker investigates the lexical contributions of English and Portuguese to Saramaccan, while George Huttar analyzes the lexical influence from various African languages in Ndyuka. Marvin Kramer focuses on the tonal characteristics of quantifiers in Saramaccan and argues that they must be attributed to Kikongo rather than Fongbe influence. Finally, Norval Smith reassesses sociohistorical data gathered by Jacques Arends.

Another five contributions discuss Caribbean languages whose histories  closely resemble those of the Surinamese creoles. Silvia Kouwenberg (Jamaica), Don Walicek (Anguilla), and William Jennings (French Guiana) compare the sociohistorical background of these countries to that of Surinam. Marie-Christine Hazaël-Massieux examines variation in the expression of possession in historical sources for various French creoles. Finally, Claire Lefebvre analyzes a visible increase in the range and inventory of double object verbs in Haitian Creole, which she states to be less frequent in Fongbe, its main substrate language.

The papers by J. Clancy Clements and John Ladhams focus on the origins of Portuguese creoles: Clements studies both historical written language data and contemporary children´s speech of Daman Creole Portuguese (India), whereas Ladhams presents a descriptive overview of Portuguese creoles worldwide based on historical language data. Pieter Muysken describes the gradual transformation of Incaic imperial Quechua into a morphologically less complex variety. Examining missionary sources, he argues that European domination led to the changes described. Philip Baker discusses the documentation of bimorphemic words in historical documents from English- and French-lexified pidgins and creoles, showing that it takes a long time for a creole to reach grammatical consistency.

The volume also includes research on (historical) pidgins, and at least two of the articles focus explicitly on them: Hans den Besten investigates Khoekhoe phonological influence on early Cape Dutch Pidgin, and Magnus Huber discusses the possible existence of a West African Pidgin Portuguese, thus arguing in favor of the continuity of a language without native speakers. The article by Christine Jourdan, who discusses Solomon Islands Pijin, analyzes the development of a pidgin into a creole: when does a pidgin become a creole, and when does a contact language turn into a main language?

All in all, this volume is clearly inspired by the works of Jacques Arends, who not only defended a gradualist approach to creole formation, but also pushed for a combination of theory-oriented and empirically-driven work. The papers collected here represent exactly such an approach.

Reviewed by Taras Shmiher, Ivan Franko National University, Ukraine

In this volume, Naomi Seidman explores translation as a site for Jewish-Christian encounters. The translational relationship that connects and separates Judaism and Christianity is a particularly rich intersection, which should be viewed not from the perspective of linguistic transfers but rather as a map of a specific set of intellectual influences. The expression of how the translators saw themselves can contribute to understanding Jewish approaches to translation. Here, S’s main objective is to interpret the linguistic controversies of translation discourse (e.g. issues of translatability, the choice between word-for-word and sense-for-sense translation, the fidelity vs. treason dichotomy, and the translator’s invisibility) as religious and political questions.

Ch. 1 begins with the theological and translational problems of the Virgin Mary’s virginity—that is, questioning the Davidic ancestry of Jesus, the status of Jesus as a son of God, and the cultural meaning of virginity. This sexual-textual knot forms the center of the Jewish-Christian polemic over the perfection of the Septuagint in late antiquity: Christian orthodoxy insisted on the virgin birth and the emendation of the Septuagint (LXX) translation, whereas rabbinic Judaism denied both Mary’s virginity and the accuracy and canonicity of the Septuagint.

Ch. 2 is dedicated to the figure of Aquila whose word-for-word Greek Bible version, produced in the first half of the second century for use in the synagogue, replaced the Septuagint in the Jewish community after it had become the Bible of the Christian Church. Aquila attempted to reproduce as many features of the Hebrew text as possible and, thus, generated an unreadable text. In a more elaborate description, Christian theology has shaped the goal for sense-for-sense translational techniques for the greatest part of its history, literalism being stereotypically obscured as the Jewish position.

In Ch. 3, S argues that Martin Luther measured the distinctiveness of his own German-language translation of the Bible by its distance from the Hebrew style of the original and the Jewish exegetical tradition. Theological aims, grounded in a scientific apparatus (e.g. Christian Hebraica free of Jewish influence), provide a culturally neutral linguistic transparence. In Luther’s Bible, God speaks not only to the German folk but even as a German.

The study of German-Jewish culture through the lens of translation, as presented in Ch. 4, shows that the formulation of translation as a variety of cultural encounter served to conceal tensions and asymmetries in the German-Jewish translation project (exemplified by Jewish translations of the Bible into German from the eighteenth through the twentieth century as well as by Walter Benjamin’s model of an interlinear Bible translation).

The significance of translation in Holocaust discourse, affected by the polyglot nature of Jewish life and demanded by the international reception, is examined in Ch. 5. The Yiddish authors whose literary heritage depends upon translation may also be regarded as victims of the Holocaust. Ch. 6 explains a wide range of political and cultural circumstances that are obstacles in translating Isaac Bashevis Singer’s works into English.

In the epilogue, S raises some ethical questions, including the issue of whether mistranslation can tell another kind of truth.

The range of data makes this book an important contribution to the translational history of the world.

Reviewed by Dennis Ryan, Raleigh, NC

Andrew Radford’s Analysing English sentences: A minimalist approach relies on the findings of Noam Chomsky’s Minimalist program (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), but also on a host of linguists whose publications support or take issue with Chomsky, to make a convincing case for deep-structure syntax. R explains key aspects of Chomsky’s program (e.g. universal grammar and the language faculty, better known as the innateness hypothesis). Although the book’s complexity increases with each chapter, the new information is contextualized well by reference to what was presented in prior chapters.

Ch. 1, ‘Grammar’ (1–38), briefly examines explanations of English syntax offered by traditional grammarians, then by Chomsky. Traditional grammar is taxonomic and descriptive whereas Chomsky’s transformational grammar is cognitive, characterized by investigations of mental states, its ultimate goal being to provide linguists with a theory of universal language use while keeping the grammatical apparatus at a minimum—therefore, minimalist. Ch. 2, ‘Structure’ (39–91), describes how words are combined into phrases and sentences by binary merger operations, visually represented by tree diagrams that manifest the constituent structure of corresponding verbal expressions. Ch. 3, ‘Null constituents’ (92–142), discusses sentence formations that contain unspoken constituents (words or phrases) that nonetheless make an important contribution to the syntax and semantics of a sentence.

Ch. 4, ‘Head movement’ (143–82), looks at merger operations that underlie the movement of modern English auxiliary verbs and earlier Elizabethan English main verbs. Ch. 5, ‘Wh-movement’ (183–237), continues to look at head movement, but this time the movement of wh-questions and wh-clauses into the specifier position of complementizer phrases, the sentence position normally occupied by clauses beginning with that, for, and if. Ch. 6, ‘A-movement’ (238–80), examines the syntax of subjects that R had previously treated as non-moving, entrenched in the specifier/subject position of the sentence or clause.

In Ch. 7, ‘Agreement, case and A-movement’ (281–323), R takes a closer look at the syntax of subject-predicate agreement in Chomsky’s minimalist terms, including probe/goal and c-command, and how agreement dictates nominative case assignment. Ch. 8, ‘Split projections’ (324–78), takes its title from R’s contention that various projections (a head word and its complement) can split into various sub-projections, and that evidence suggests verb phrases can be subdivided into lexical verb and light verb projections. Finally, Ch. 9, ‘Phases’ (379–438), reviews Chomsky’s arguments that syntactic structures are built up in phases.

R has put together a well-organized textbook for teachers and students that focuses on specific topics, with summaries, extensive bibliographies, and workbook sections and model answers to exercises at the end of each chapter. Ironically, in calling for a minimal grammar, R has compiled a formidable lexicon of language operations: his glossary contains roughly 940 minimalist terms, though he incorporates many constructs without a counterpart in traditional grammars. Nevertheless, I note that R must use traditional grammar to explain minimalist grammar and must use the same words in the same language it is trying to analyze, which suggests that the task of fully understanding language is insurmountable. In this context, it is significant that R relies on such words as ’intuition’ and ‘intuitive guesses’, which suggests that some problems of language are better left to the silence within.

Reviewed by Thomas Schares, Arbeitsstelle Hamburg, Germany

The Academia Româna has the task of setting the standards for Romanian orthography, grammar, and lexicography. The present two volumes replace the previous version, which, for more than forty years, has set normative standards for the Romanian language. Under the editorial supervision of Valeria Guţu Romalo, this version of the grammar takes a remarkable turn from normative to descriptive linguistic treatment. This grammar describes the standard literary variety of contemporary Romanian. The linguistic melting pot situation in the Balkans region necessitates standardization, and although Romanian has considerable regional variation, these volumes provide a literary variety that is free of regionalisms.

Volume 1, ‘Cuvântul’ (‘The word’), is dedicated to the word classes from a lexico-grammatical viewpoint, and Volume 2, ‘Enunţul’ (‘The phrase’), is dedicated to discourse-analytical matters of text-stylistics, describing the organization and function of words within syntactic groups.

Volume 1 begins with a preface (vii–xii), a list of abbreviations and symbols (xiii–xvi), and an introduction (1–3). Ch. 1, ‘Unităţile limbii’ (5–35), outlines the parts of speech and describes the relations between the lexical unit, inflection, and syntax (i.e. word, morpheme, phrase). Ch. 2, ‘Clase de cuvinte’ (37–60), summarizes the use of pronouns, numerals, articles, and other word classes with grammatical functions. The following chapters describe the other word classes: the noun, ‘Substantivul’ (61–139); the adjective, ‘Adjectvul’ (141–78); the pronoun, ‘Pronumele’ (181–288); the numeral, ‘Numeralul’ (289–322); the verb ‘Verbul’ (323–583); the adverb, ‘Adverbul’ 585–605); the preposition, ‘Prepoziţia’ (607–30); the conjunction, ‘Conjuncţia’ (631–54); and the interjection, ‘Interjecţia’ (657–84).

Volume 2 describes the Romanian language from the perspective of the phrase and the text. It is divided into two parts. Part 1 is dedicated to syntax: it explores syntactic structures, ‘Structuri sintactice’ (47–231), and syntactic functions, ‘Funcţii sintactice’ (238–619), such as subject-predicate-relations, complements, and case relations. Part 2 explores aspects of textual grammar and stylistics as well as types of discourse (i.e. genres) in ‘Organizarea discursivă’ (635–947). It also contains a chapter on intonation and accent (902–47) and a chapter on punctuation (947–56). Overall, only a chapter on phonology is missing, but, since Romanian has a very phonetic orthography (like Spanish in many respects), a chapter on phonology may not be necessary.

Each volume contains a thematic bibliography and a detailed table of contents, which enables quick reference. Volume 2 also contains a general bibliography and a brief subject index.

These volumes, which are designed for native speakers of Romanian, define a standard for national education as well as a framework for academic study. Additionally, due to the lack of detailed and elaborate grammatical reference works for Romanian, advanced second language learners and Romance language scholars will also find this to be a coherent reference for the language.

Because these volumes are essential to scholars of Romanian and because it is difficult to purchase copies abroad, it would be helpful if the Academia Româna would consider publishing pdf-versions of these volumes that could be distributed via its homepage on the internet. This would certainly increase the national and international consideration and esteem this important grammar deserves.

Reviewed by Susanne Wagner, Chemnitz University of Technology

In the prologue, Peter Collins emphasizes the comparative nature of the nineteen chapters of this volume in two respects. First, practically all contributors used a combination of corpora from two corpus ‘families’, namely the written LOB/Brown and the spoken/written ICE corpora from Great Britain, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Second, the studies focus primarily on the position of the antipodean varieties relative to ‘traditional’ first languages in Europe and America and to each other, but also discuss the position of Australian English (AE) and New Zealand English (NZE) varieties in light of theories such as Edgar Schneider’s dynamic model (Postcolonial English: Varieties around the world, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Many of the authors here extend earlier research to AE and NZE varieties (e.g. Heidi Quinn, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair).

The studies are divided into five major sections, ranging from morphology and functional sentence units (nouns, verbs, and noun and verb phrases) to the clause and sentence level and beyond (discourse), though many chapters could have been included in more than one section. However, some of the placements are not intuitive, e.g. the inclusion of Janet Holmes, Robert J. Sigley, and Agnes Terraschke’s chapter on gender-neutral language under ‘noun phrase’. While the discussion focuses on nouns, it also includes adjectives and of course gender-neutral language is primarily not a formal but a sociocultural, pragmatic phenomenon.

Most of the studies suffer from an age-old problem in morphosyntactic comparison, lack of examples ( Pam Peters on irregular verbs; Quinn, Mair, Johan Elsness). Certain constructions and forms occur so rarely (in the single digits) as to not even permit the most basic statistical analyses. Tellingly, the only elaborate quantitative analysis (Kate Kearns on variable rules) is not based on the small one-million-word corpora. Low-frequency, genre-restricted items such as hypocoristics are almost non-existent in the small corpora, leaving the internet as the source of choice (Dianne Bardsley and Jane Simpson). Some authors also make use of the questionnaire-type results from Australian style (Peters, Elsness).

The small corpora can mostly only uncover tendencies and are clearly unsuited for generalizations. Sociolinguistic analyses, for example, which may help shed light on change in progress, are impossible, as is the qualification of dialect influence. Detailed evaluations also raise the question whether these comparative corpora truly are comparable (ICE US missing; ICE GB not representative, Mair, p.271; written part of ICE NZ ‘somewhat conservative’, Peters, p.135; time lag between corpus compilations; lack of diachronic data, etc.).

Only few truly antipodean patterns are identified: e.g. hypocoristics (Bardsley and Simpson) and clause-final like (Jim Miller) and but (Jean Mulder, Sandra A. Thompson, and Cara Penry Williams). Interestingly, NZE emerges as rather conservative in writing but highly colloquial in speech, in contrast to AE, where the two registers are closer together. Generally, parallels between AE and NZE are stronger than the differences, grouping the varieties closer to each other than to either American English or British English. A major next research step could involve the comparison of AE and NZE with Singapore English as a ‘neighbouring’ variety and South African English(es) as the third southern hemisphere variety (Peters, ‘Epilogue’).

Practically all studies suggest further research and extension beyond the varieties studied, and emphasize the need for larger corpora, particularly for colloquial spoken language. Nevertheless, a trend of increasing colloquialization can be identified in several studies. In the end, most authors conclude that variation within rather than between varieties is most decisive in their subfield: written vs. spoken data as well as different registers within subgenres show the most significant trends, but very often this cannot be confirmed due once again to a lack of data for genre comparisons.

Reviewed by Benjamin W. Fortson IV, University of Michigan

Behind the matter-of-fact title is a magisterial marriage of zoology, intellectual and scientific history, and etymology. Many familiar examples of Linnaean binomial nomenclature are straightforward and descriptive (Homo sapiens ‘wise man’, Canis familiaris ‘household dog’); but, since new genera and species are constantly being discovered and each new name must be unique, sooner or later one runs out of Greek and Latin nouns and adjectives. Necessity is the mother of invention, and H. D. Cameron’s dictionary shows us not only how limitless—and arbitrary—nomenclatural invention can be but also how much extra-zoological information about a name’s author can be needed to understand the source of a particular genus name.

The problems are neatly summarized, with examples, in the introduction (274–75). Perhaps the most difficult genera, and the ones whose successful etymologizing by C is most worthy of admiration, are those that stem from incidental events, reading matter, words in specific editions of reference works, or other often random items on the author’s mind at the time he or she named the genus. One marvels at how C managed to figure these out and at his surely nonpareil knowledge of the habits and quirks of dozens of individual scholars of the past several centuries as well as the broader intellectual currents of their times. Examples abound of authors whose arachnology was better than their Latin or Greek (e.g. Anelosimus, Ctenus, Deinopis, Drassus, Gnaphosa, Porrhomma, Rhecostica). C’s discussions of some of these names make truly jaw-dropping reading for anyone who assumes (wrongly) that the practice of biological nomenclature has been a fiefdom reserved for a few august experts in the Classical languages.

On the theoretical linguistic side of things, it is worth noting—although it is not all that surprising—that some well-known processes of language change are at work in the history of spider-genus naming as well. That these processes are not limited to spoken language sometimes goes unappreciated, along with the corollary that educational level has nothing to do with how likely one is to commit linguistic reanalyses. C devotes the last half of his introduction to missegmentation (i.e. metanalysis), illustrating for example how the genus Lycosa, from the Greek feminine participle luksa ‘tearing like a wolf’, spawned a slew of rhyming genera in -osa and ‑cosa by authors who did not recognize the original morphology or even the morpheme boundaries.

Most of the hundreds of entries are invested with considerable detail and really amount to short essays, all lively and illuminating reading for anyone interested in the caprices of this corner of science and its practitioners and the history of names. One wishes that this work’s uniqueness does not last long. Similar works could be written about the genera in other taxonomic groups. Dinosaurs and their kin spring immediately to mind…

Reviewed by Christopher R. Green, Indiana University

Strength relations in phonology is a volume of selected works developed from presentations given at a workshop of the same name in September 2006. The papers in this volume draw upon a wide variety of languages and encompass a number of different theoretical persuasions in defining and characterizing positions and structures that mark phonological strength. The volume has two sections, the first containing six papers on segmental strength, and the second containing five works addressing strength relations at higher prosodic levels.

Among the works on segmental strength is a paper by John Harris (9–45) that argues against the popular idea that obstruent devoicing is a strengthening process by examining its patterning and showing its parallels to weakening in the same position. Harris’s analysis largely supports what he describes as a ‘modulated-carrier model of strength’ in which weakening processes, like final devoicing, decrease modulation of the carrier signal by feature deletion. The editors themselves (47–77) continue the discussion of segmental strength by considering the relationship between melodic and prosodic headedness. They determine that elements with a melodic head play into the overall melodic strength of the domain, as well as the prosodic strength and perceptibility of the entire expression. A further element-based approach from Bert Botma (79–111) determines that the specification of nasality at a given level of representation, whether underlying, syllabic, or sub-syllabic, must come into play to account for different types of nasal harmony found crosslinguistically. Daniel A. Dinnsen and Ashley Farris-Trimble (114–48) detail a proposed shift in phonological prominence from coda to onset position during first language (L1) learners’ acquisition of English. Eirimi Sanoudaki (149–81) also discusses L1 acquisition and matters of segmental complexity in CVCV theory by considering historical and synchronic aspects of diglossia in Greek. The offering by Hidetoshi Shiraishi (183–218) motivates an account of a typologically-unpredicted process of initial weakening that the author attributes to contrast generation and perceptibility.

The works on prosodic strength begin with Colin J. Ewen and Bert Botma’s reassessment (221–50) of English rhymal adjuncts, in which they step away from earlier government phonology analyses favoring the assignment of these constituents to their own node. Nancy C. Kula and Lutz Marten (251–84) explore the application of Strict CV to languages lacking initial clusters by referring to the ability of an initial CV unit to be governed. A formal relationship between constituents in syllable margins, supported by data on L1 acquisition and synchronic and diachronic data from several languages, is offered by Karen Baertsch and Stuart Davis (283–316). Ben Hermans (317–71) discusses tone licensing and mora headedness in his study of the two tonal accents in Limburg. The volume closes with Yuko Yoshida’s government-based analysis of lexical accent (374–89) in Japanese dialects supported by the vocalic properties of the two language varieties.

Reviewed by Marc Pierce, University of Texas at Austin

This book, prepared by one of the most productive and best-known historians of linguistics, offers exactly what the title indicates: an index of names and birth and death dates of important linguists. No other biographical information is given; for that, Koerner refers readers to other sources. There are three brief prefatory sections: ‘Preface and acknowledgements’ (vii–ix) explains the origins and limits of the project; ‘Afterthought’ (x) reviews some of the sources used in compiling the index; and ‘Remarks on the arrangement of the index’ (xi–xvi) discusses matters like alphabetical ordering and transliteration. The index is printed in double columns, and the volume itself is sturdily bound and cleanly edited with only a handful of typographical errors. As to its accuracy, I spot-checked a number of the entries and found them generally correct.

Projects like this invariably face a good deal of difficulty: they can never be exhaustive, one can always quibble over the scholars who are included, and they can quickly become outdated (e.g. Elmer Antonsen, a well-known Germanic linguist, is listed in this volume as still living, although he died in the summer of 2008). Some might also think that such projects are not very useful (after all, how helpful can it be to know an author’s birth and death dates in the absence of any other biographical information?), but, as K points out, ‘such biographical dates place an author at least in some chronological context’ (vii), thus demonstrating the usefulness of such projects. My one major reservation about the volume is its extremely high cost, which presumably could have been avoided by making the index available on the internet (which also would have allowed periodic updating). The author notes that he considered this possibility, but ultimately rejected it for the understandable reason that he wanted some sort of return for the decades of work invested in its compilation (ix). These issues aside, the book will be a handy resource, especially for historians of linguistics, and certainly deserves a place on library bookshelves.

Reviewed by Siaw-Fong Chung, National Chengchi University

This book collects six papers written as a tribute to John Sinclair to document some of his major concepts in lexicography and corpus linguistics. After an introduction to Sinclair’s career, Rosamund Moon discusses the Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary (CCELD), which followed Sinclair’s principles of lexicography, featuring listing of senses (according to frequency), phraseology, and emphasis on corpora examples. M also details the conflict between lexicography and marketability, which is why the creativity of the Collins Cobuild project ‘did not lead to the kind of financial success which could have secured its survival in its original research-led form’ (2).

Geoff Barnbrook elaborates the two models of interpretation in Ch. 8 of Sinclair’s Corpus, Concordance, Collocations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991): the open-choice and idiom principles. The first is a ‘slot-and-filler’ model that allows grammatical judgment to be made; and the second ‘presupposes that language users select from a set of semi-constructed phrases’ (23). Barnbrook then reinvestigates the distributions of the word back in a sample of 100 concordance lines from the Bank of English and concludes that the ordering of senses provided by Sinclair’s team is still predictive.

Charles Owen responds to ‘The Meeting of lexis and grammar’ in the same book, focusing on his analysis of of. Despite Sinclair’s claim to fuse lexis with grammar, Owen postulates a gradience analysis of the headedness of of (from a lot of money to a hatred of money to a child of money) and proposes an omissibility test for whether N1 or N2 is the head in each nominal group.

Using hatred as an example, Wolfgang Teubert argues that pattern grammar, which expects grammatical categories to be aligned closely with semantic distinctions, cannot account for the different meanings entailed by such phrases as hatred of a million coolies—whether coolies are the people who hate or those being hated. Instead, a ‘Continental model of valency and dependency’ (67) is proposed, involving a substitution test and dependency grammar. Using the traditional classification of genitives in Indo-European languages (e.g. genitivus partitivus, genitivus possessivus, genetivus explicativus), the author differentiates complements (their hatred for release) from adjuncts (their hatred for many years) (63).

Susan Hunston calls for attention to judgments of positive and negative ‘semantic prosody’, which have often been based on observations of positive or negative words surrounding the word of interest. As a counterexample, the word cause was found to express ‘no particular attitude’ when investigated in a specialized corpus of academic texts (87). Hunston warns that ‘collocational inference’, ‘intertextuality’ and ‘predictive value of frequent occurrences’ should not be exploited to the extent that one transfers attitudinal meaning from instance to instance (95–96).

The final article by Michael Toolan is entirely different, stimulating a philosophical, in-depth discussion of placing one’s trust in a text to revisit some of Sinclair’s assumptions. The author analogizes investigation of cooccurrences to placement of trust in a text. When one encounters an unexpected cooccurrence, ‘trust breaks down, does not truly exist, where the person or thing trusted turns out not to be trustworthy’ (108). Toolan also claims that no literary text resembles another since each writer possesses a unique writing style; therefore, sampling is impossible for literary texts. Finally, Toolan analogizes retrospection with cohesion, repetition, and reference.

Reviewed by Marc Pierce, University of Texas at Austin

This dictionary contains over 25,000 entries of slang and unconventional English usage.  All of the terms are American, and are attested after 1945. This year was chosen as a starting point because it ‘marked the beginning of a series of profound cultural changes that produced the lexicon of modern and contemporary slang’ (vii). The entries are structured conventionally: a headword is given, followed by a definition, a brief editorial comment (not all of the entries contain this), the country of origin, a date of attestation, and examples. For instance, the entry on ‘Dagwood’ (268) defines it as ‘a large and elaborate sandwich’; informs the reader that the term originated in the United States, existed by 1948, and is ‘[n]amed after the sandwiches made by the Dagwood Bumstead character in the Blondie comic strip’; and gives an example of its use from James Ellroy’s novel Hollywood Nocturnes (New York: O. Penzler Books, 1994). Phrases are generally ‘placed under their first significant word. However, some invariant phrases are listed as head words’ (viii). The book also contains a number of ethnically, racially, and/or sexually offensive terms. This is not to say that this is a mistake, as omitting these terms would obscure the situation, but rather that potential readers should be aware of their inclusion.

A spot-check of entries revealed no glaring errors, except for the omission of the use of ‘air ball’ as a basketball term meaning ‘a shot that misses the basket, rim, and backboard’, which was apparently coined in the late 1970s (9). Definitions of the term having to do with pinball and pool are given, although I suspect that the basketball term is the most common usage of the term.

In sum, this dictionary is both entertaining and informative, and those who browse through it will be well-rewarded for their efforts.