Dry Rivers and Standing Rocks: A Word Finder for the American West - Softcover

Thybony, Scott

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826322611 ISBN 13: 9780826322616

Verlag: University of New Mexico Press, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

All writers get stuck looking for the right word. Noticing that this was an acute problem for writers in the West because standard thesauruses face east, Scott Thybony started a file of western words. Sorting through spoken and written texts, he looked, as he puts it, for 'grounded talk', 'place-linked words, both rooted and wind-blown'. He ended up with a list of western place names, cowboyisms, American Indian words on permanent loan, Spanish terms, a sprinkling of Arabic, some scientific terms, and an assortment of random coinings, borrowings, and outright expropriations. Soon this evolved from a computer file to the book he calls Dry Rivers and Standing Rocks and describes as 'something resembling a thesaurus of western geography'. This book is full of information but it's not really a reference book. It reads like poetry. But you don't need to be a writer to appreciate it. Readers, teachers, hikers, cartographers, even crossword puzzlers will love this book. Neither scholarly nor comprehensive, it's a collection to make you think. It contains paired words like standing rock, grafts like snaggletooth, loners like hoodoo.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Scott Thybony

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of New Mexico Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2000
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0826322611
• ISBN 13: 9780826322616
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 104
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar