GONE ARE the days when dictionaries and grammars came wearing a funereal cowl. Today our publishers are out to make these futsy volumes a pleasure to handle. Here is a good teacher who gives both British and American spellings for nearly a lakh and sixty thousand entries. Piggy boy on the cover of the Dictionary of Idioms zooms in space piloting a toy aeroplane to enable us probe the roots of familiar expressions.
Idioms play a terrible mischief in cultural translation and a proper understanding is essential.
In Britain it is particularly associated with the reports of the then Environment Secretary, Nicholas Ridley's opposition in 1988 to housing developments near his own home.'' With an election round the corner, the Indian journalist would find Speake's collection a reliable assistant. Like the English idioms, the foreign words and phrases that have entered the English language are a great temptation for the writer in English. After the giggly cover with a wedding in progress, it is a pleasant party hosted by Speake again as we taste nearly 8000 entries which have originated from languages like Afrikaans, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew and Latin. What is of particular interest to the audience is that we need no more scout around for translations of samosa and samskara, corah and fez, jalebi and moksha. At the same time what we may consider familiar may be an unfamiliar word.