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Newest Reference Reviews (view source)
Revision as of 09:27, 20 November 2015
, 09:27, 20 November 2015no edit summary
[[Category:New Reviews|Reference]]
[[Category:Reference|*]] __NOTOC__ <!-- Remove -->
{{newreview
|author=Graeme Donald
|title=Words of a Feather
|rating=4
|genre=Reference
|summary= Words of a Feather. The title alone suggests an engaging read about language, and the book certainly delivers. It pairs seemingly unrelated words, digs up their etymological roots and reveals their common ancestry. The English language, of course, provides rich pickings indeed for a book of this type and it is fascinating to see the hidden meaning behind common and not-so-common words. Some connections are fairly obvious once you read them. For example, the link between ''grotto'' and ''grotesque'' is easy to grasp: the word ''grotesque'' derives from unpleasant figures depicted in murals in Ancient Roman ''grottoes''. Other connections are just extraordinary, like the so-crazy-you-couldn't-make-it-up connection between ''furnace'' and ''fornicate''. These two words date back to Ancient Rome when prostitutes took over the city's abandoned baking domes. And some connections are more than a little tenuous, seemingly just a collection of words banded together, as is the case with the ''insult'' and ''salmon'' pairing. One of my personal favourites: the Italian word ''schiavo'' for ''slave'' was used to summon or dismiss a slave; this word became corrupted to ''ciao'', a word the more well-heeled among us use instead of ''goodbye''.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>178418814X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author= Stephen Hickman
|summary=I've run a website for over eight years now but I've always shied away from any inclusion of e-commerce on the site. It seemed like too large a subject, too much complexity and choice and the possibility of problems which could go disastrously wrong. I first encountered Alannah Moore when I read [[The Creative Person's Website Builder by Alannah Moore|The Creative Person's Website Builder]] and was impressed by the way that she approached her subject, so when I had the opportunity to see how to create an online store in a weekend, I jumped at the chance.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1781571430</amazonuk>
}}