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When Emma's little brother Jake looks after the neighbor's dog in preparation for getting his own puppy, the pet goes missing and Emma and the rest of the girls have to find it before the owner comes home.
Do you have an "eagle-eye" for a bargain? Have you ever been "hounded" by a "loan-shark" or hustled by a "pool-shark"? Have you been the victim of a "stool-pigeon" or a "rat", or the "scapegoat" for some "foxy" character's misdeeds? Expressions like these lend color and character to our everyday conversation. Many of them are so familiar that we rarely pause to wonder how or when they came into use in the language. But their origins are fascinating to discover and fun to share.
p.B. J. Whiting savors proverbial expressions and has devoted much of his lifetime to studying and collecting them; no one knows more about British and American proverbs than he. The present volume, based upon writings in British North America from the earliest settlements to approximately 1820, complements his and Archer Taylor's Dictionary of American Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, 1820-1880. It differs from that work and from other standard collections, however, in that its sources are primarily not "literary" but instead workaday writings - letters, diaries, histories, travel books, political pamphlets, and the like. The authors represent a wide cross-section of the populace, from scholars and statesmen to farmers, shopkeepers, sailors, and hunters. Mr. Whiting has combed all the obvious sources and hundreds of out-of-the-way publications of local journals and historical societies. This body of material, "because it covers territory that has not been extracted and compiled in a scholarly way before, can justly be said to be the most valuable of all those that Whiting has brought together," according to Albert B. Friedman. "What makes the work important is Whiting's authority: a proverb or proverbial phrase is what BJW thinks is a proverb or proverbial phrase. There is no objective operative definition of any value, no divining rod; his tact, 'feel, ' experience, determine what's the real thing and what is spurious."
Mike Thompson, Florida's nationally acclaimed "Mr. Conservative, " unfolds a serious, insightful and witty comparison of conservative and liberal politics, history, language, ideas and culture.
Have you ever heard an idiom and you took it literally? Idiom - as in that phrase - for example, "It's Raining Cats and Dogs!" Well, in this story a fifth grade student called Jade is just like some guys his age who can get into a "slippery" situation when he took an idiom literally. When his mom came home, she told him that it was "raining cats and dogs" so he had to do a "raincheck" on those dogs and cats from the heaven! Which got him into a "slippery" situation but not literally.
"[Ruwet] raises fundamental questions about the place of grammar in the study of language and provides several studies which suggest the possibility that some core data are outside the realm of grammatical explanation. A very remarkable book, in which the breadth of Ruwet's reflection is both challenging and deeply rewarding."—Denis Bouchard, University of Quebec, Montreal
One Story a Day for Beginners is a series of 365 little stories in 12 books that touch on a wide variety of topics. The series is designed to foster children's total development—linguistic, intellectual, social, and cultural—through the joy of reading.
