The Life of Language

About Sol Steinmetz

SOL STEINMETZ, a well-known lexicographer, has published more than thirty-five dictionaries and reference books, including the recent Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meaning. He lives in New Rochelle, New York.

About Barbara Ann Kipfer

Lexicographer Barbara Ann Kipfer holds a Ph.D. and an M.Phil in linguistics from England's University of Exeter, and is a pioneer in electronic lexical systems. She has designed and assembled lexicographic references and conducted lexicographic researches for many clients. She is a member of the Dictionary Society of North America, the Association of Computational Linguistics, and the European Association for Lexicography.

Praise

The Life of Language, subtitled “the fascinating ways words are born, live and die,” by Sol Steinmetz and Barbara Ann Kipfer (Random House trade paperback, $17). This scholarly but easy-to-breeze-through introduction to the world of words, written by a pair of crack lexicographers (Sol is a longtime mentor of On Language), ranks as the linguistic bargain of the year.
From baby talk to back-formation, from minting new words to functional shift, the subjects are treated with amusing erudition. The chapter on reduplication – “flip-flopping higgledy-piggledy through the riffraff” – differentiates rhyming compounds like bigwig, hotshot, ragtag, sci-fi from repetitions called tautonyms, such as bye-bye, so-so, rah-rah, as well as from ricochet words in which the repeated element is modified: chit-chat, roly-poly, shilly-shally.
They reveal the source of the “schm-/shm- reduplication,” from the Yiddish koyfn, shmoyfn, “To buy, not to buy, who cares?” This construction led to the adoption in English of fancy-schmancy to mean “pretentious” and to the jocular derogation of a host of words and names (“Oedipus, schmoedipus – as long as he loves his mother”). Boinng!
--William Safire, The New York Times, December 3, 2006


From the Trade Paperback edition.