Customer Reviews

The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Kacirk once again delves into the dusty attics and musty cellars of the English language and comes up with hundreds more antiquated words to amuse and enlighten you. The only disappointment for me is that he doesn't delve at length into the curious folklore surrounding each word and its origins, unlike his first book, "Forgotten English." However, you're given enough interesting factoids to chew on, and are further compensated by the fact that less folklore leaves more room for more oddball words!

A must for any avid reader, writer, or anyone interested in the history of the English language.

Jeffrey Kacirk dedicates "The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Ever Forgotten" to Lewis Carroll because of the delectable verbiage introduced in "Jabberwocky." This seems right, as Kacirk's choice of words here are as fun, unique and rarely use Carroll's.

This is not an etymological study, but an comfortable overview of antiquated words.

He start off with 'abbey-lubber,' which is a pretentious loiterer in a religious house. I am unsure how I'll tastefully work this into a sentence next Sunday at church, but I am glad to have such a word in my quiver should the occasion arise.

Don't dismay if, while reading this, you feel you are seeing words new to you. Most of these words haven't escaped rare book rooms in 200 years. For example, we prefer, 'librarian' over 'bibliothecary' and children tend to choose 'sleepy' instead of 'Billy-wink.'

As Kacirk defines words, he slips in a number of woodcut illustrations, adding to the appeal. They are always somehow correlated with a word on that page.

Grab a glass of something cold, and thoughtfully stroke your 'ziff' (beard) while reading this in a 'zypthesary' (brewhouse). It may be 'faffle' (work occupied requiring much labor with non-commensurate results), but maybe not.

I enjoyed "The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Ever Forgotten" by Jeffrey Kacirk.

Anthony Trendl
editor, HungarianBookstore.com

I thought that there would be more information about the origin and usage of the words. I was expecting something more along the lines of "the Professor and the Madman"---something that gave a historical view of why words stopped being popularly used. However, it's interesting to look over the lists of definitions---you can almost hear how people used to talk.

Jeffrey Kacirk's "The Word Museum" piqued my interest just by its basic promise, a book about words and their antiquated meanings. It sounds like a very good idea.

Unfortunately, Kacirk botched the execution of it and what resulted was a very subpar and mostly uninteresting collection of word definitions. That's it, just definitions. The worst part is, usage dates (dates the words might have been in use) contextual quotes and word origins weren't even included.

Well, actually, usage dates were included, by way of the name of an author who used it, that you had to go and look up in a glossary at the back of the book. Talk about unnecessarily cludgy and annoying.

Ok, the origin of words is a bit complex to research for a book, but the other two shouldn't have been that difficult. Had Kacirk actually put the usage dates along with the definitions, and included a contextual quote (most of the authors were before 1900 so copyrights wouldn't be an issue), this book would have been far more interesting and worth spending money on.

Jeffrey Kacirk, The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten (Simon and Schuster, 2000)

A small, yet wonderful, dictionary of words that, for the most part, are no longer in use and probably should be. Other reviewers have pointed out that Kacirk could have done more with this, and they're correct, but I had no problems at all with what's here. The only real expectations I had coming into this were that I'd get the words and find out what they meant, and that's exactly what I got. It's better than your thesaurus. You need it. ****

This was a great idea for a book on English, but I agree with the earlier reviewer that the execution was poor. It's simply a list of archaic words with their definitions, but the problem with that is that the language of the definitions themselves is often archaic and difficult to understand, since the author uses the definitions of the original sources, many of which use other words and/or wording which are obscure or unintelligible to the modern reader. Many of the definitions are still deciperable but the overall value and usefulness of the book is greatly reduced by this limited approach. Fortunately I bought the Connect Reader ebook version of the volume for my Sony PRS500 Reader so I paid much less than the hard copy price, which makes the deal almost tolerable. To give the author some credit he does mention the original source, which is fine for the scholars out there who want to pursue the subject further, but not very useful for the rest of us. So unless you're already an accomplished English etymologist I recommend you pass this one by. I'm no authority in this area but I'm sure there are better books on historical etymology and lexicography out there.

If you love language, you will love paging through Jeffrey Kacirk's "The Word Museum." Just a few samples..."hurple," "flamfloo," and "bruzzle." I made the mistake of purchasing it first on Kindle. This is a book to pick up and page through randomly. Hard to do on with an e-book. I liked it so much, I purchased is again in paperback. Much easier to page through. Just a lot of fun.

This book is a treasure trove for those of us interested in the obscure.

Even 'grammar-folk' (educated people) will be 'blutterbunged' (confounded, overcome by surprise).

Highly recommended for those of us who love what is obscure.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

I LOVE THIS BOOK. Re-discovering words that were forgotten or out of style --
I highly recommend it. Trust me -- study it and then you can use certain words
and people will have no idea what you are talking about. Fun!

This is an excellent resource for students. Slip in a few forgotten English words and leave your English professor scratching their head. When they ask say you found the word in the dictionary. :-)