Why are golf assistants called caddies? Why do the British drive on the left and North Americans on the right? Why is football played on a "gridiron," and a leg injury called a "Charlie horse"?
The answers to these questions and the origins of hundreds of other expressions and customs are brought together in this fascinating collection of the history behind everyday words and routines.
With all the conciseness of his original radio scripts, Doug Lennox "cuts to the quick" in telling you the things you always wanted to know.

Phrases such as "go with the flow" and "hang around" are easy as pie with this fun and memorable guide to idioms for English-language students. Often a difficult aspect to master in a nonnative language, expressions that cannot be deduced from their individual words become fun to learn with the included word games, quizzes, and puzzles.

Clinical Sociolinguistics examines how sociolinguistic research paradigms can be applied to assessment, diagnosis and treatment in the clinical situation.
# fills gap in the literature for speech-language pathologists by addressing how sociolinguistic research paradigms can be applied to assessment, diagnosis and treatment in the clinical situation
# collects newly commissioned articles written by top scholars in the field
# includes chapters that outline findings from sociolinguistic research over the last 40 years and point to the relevance of such findings for practicing speech-language pathologists
#  discusses topics including bilingualism, code-switching, language planning, and African-American English
# “Individuals acquire language, and lose it, in a variety of contexts. Gender, geography, socioeconomic status and bilingualism are all relevant to clinical reasoning about speech and language disorders. This timely volume is grounded in state-of-the art sociolinguistic research, but also demonstrates the application of sociolinguistic thinking to the clinical situation. It will be an invaluable text for those professionals faced with linguistically and culturally diverse client groups, and for students and researchers in communication disorders.” Paul Fletcher, University College Cork 

This book contains 25 essays about English words, and how they are defined, valued, and discussed. The book is divided into four sections. The first section, "Language Lore," examines some of the myths and misconceptions that affect attitudes toward language--and towards English in particular. The second section, "Language Usage," examines some specific questions of meaning and usage. Section 3, "Language Trends," examines some controversial trends in English vocabulary, and some developments too new to have received comment before. The fourth section, "Language Politics," treats several aspects of linguistic politics, from special attempts to deal with the ethnic, religious, or sex-specific elements of vocabulary to the broader issues of language both as a reflection of the public consciousness and the U.S. Constitution and as a refuge for the most private forms of expression.