How to use this Page

Are you an Athena when it comes to literary allusions, or are they your kryptonite? Either way, the Oxford Dictionary of Reference and Allusion can be your Henry Higgins, providing fascinating information on the literary and pop culture references that make reading and entertainment so rich. Take this quiz, Zorro, and leave your calling card.

Andrew Delahunty and Sheila Dignen are freelance lexicographers who have extensive experience compiling dictionaries. From classical mythology to modern movies and TV shows, the revised and updated Oxford Dictionary of Reference and Allusion, third edition explains the meanings of more than 2,000 allusions in use in modern English, from Abaddon to Zorro, Tartarus to Tarzan, and Rambo to Rubens.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only dictionary articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Do you know your references and allusions? appeared first on OUPblog.

[In fishing for words I seem to have caught rather a lot - this is quite a long post so please enjoy with a nice cup of tea or coffee!]

Photo: kasperbs

M has been learning to read at school since November. It’s been a delight and a source of amazement to me to see her skill unfold and now with just a week left till the summer holidays begin I’ve been looking for different ways to support her reading whilst school’s out. She’s not what I would call an enthusiastic reader at the moment – yes, she loves to listen to stories and can spend a long time taking in every detail of illustrations, but reading by herself hasn’t yet become something she does for the sheer pleasure of it.

I’ve wondered if this might be partly because she’s had such a rich diet of books already – fantastic picture books with great stories and delicious illustrations, or audiobooks and bedtime chapter books with engaging stories of real literary merit that whisk her away to wonderful worlds where she can spend hours and hours, and swapping all of this for simple, cheaply illustrated early readers is asking a lot.

I know that I find it hard to go from The Secret Garden (our current bedtime book), How to train your dragon and all the other stories in that series (M’s favourite audiobooks at the moment) and picture books like One Smart Fish, The Tale of the Firebird or Nothing to Do to things like Ron Rabbit’s Big Day (even if it is written by Julia Donaldson) or A Cat in the Tree.

So with the summer holidays almost upon us I’ve been looking for ways to keep her reading and to bolster her enjoyment. One complaint she explicitly makes about the books she brings home from school is their length. So in thinking how to overcome the lack of motivation when it comes to reading I’ve been looking at … dictionaries.

Perhaps not the most obvious choice when it comes to texts for early readers, especially as I wasn’t looking at them to boost her vocabulary, or to help with her spelling (although this may come later on) but rather as a source of short texts that we could dip in an out of, perhaps a few times a day, rather than sitting down for a “long” reading session (almost an impossibility with a younger sibling around anyway!)

One of the most distinctive characteristics of English is the number of words and phrases it has borrowed - and continues to borrow - from other languages, originally and most notably from Latin and French but now also from every corner of the globe. These words and phrases have been collected together to form From Bonbon to Cha-Cha: The Oxford Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases by Andrew Delahunty. But not all foreign-looking words are quite what they seem, as is explained by the excerpt below.

A number of words that look like foreign imports are not all that they seem. Some have been formed on the model of an existing foreign word and, while they have the appearance of a loanword, in fact have no equivalent in the supposed source language. Nom de plume is a good example. This term for ‘an assumed name used by a writer instead of their real name, a pen-name’ certainly looks French enough. But it was formed in English from French words in the early 19th century, based on the pattern of the genuinely French nom de guerre, ‘an assumed name under which a person engages in combat or some other activity or enterprise’. Similarly, bon viveur is a pseudo-French coinage, formed from the French words for ‘good’ and ‘living person’ to match the earlier imported phrase bon vivant. The Italian-sounding braggadocio, denoting boastful or arrogant behaviour, was originally the name Edmund Spenser gave to a boastful character in his poem The Faerie Queene. The ending is based on the authentically Italian suffix -occio (suggesting something large of its kind); the first part comes from the English brag or braggart.

Sometimes a foreign word can act as a template for other, often humorous, coinages. Literati, from Latin, dates from the 17th century and refers to well-educated people who are interested in literature. Their modern descendants include the glitterati (fashionable people or celebrities), the chatterati (another term for the chattering classes, intellectual or artistic people who express liberal opinions), and the digerati (computing experts regarded as a class). Sitzkrieg, formed on the analogy of blitzkrieg (literally ‘a lightning war’), was used in English in the 1940s to convey the idea of ‘a sit-down war’, a war, or a phase of a war, in which there is little or no active warfare. The Russian and Yiddish suffix -nik (as in words like Sputnik and kibbutznik) has been used, particularly since the 1950s, to form English words denoting a person associated with a specified thing or quality, such as refusenik, peacenik, beatnik, and no-goodnik.

El is the Spanish definite article, the equivalent of English the, as in El Dorado and El Greco. In the 20th century it has been used in English not only in titles such as El Supremo, but also in colloquial expressions as el cheapo. First recorded in the 1960s, this means ‘very cheap, of poor quality’, the English adjective cheap made to resemble a Spanish word by the addition of an o. The Costa Brava and Costa del Sol have inspired other pseudo-Spanish names of resort areas such as the Costa Geriatrica, describing one largely frequented or inhabited by elderly people.