Dictionary Reviews

If you want to get the tapes that accompany this book, then do a search on: "Conversational Italian in 7 Days". (If you write "7" instead of spelling out "seven" another version of this book comes up. This version includes the language tapes for just a few more dollars.

Believe me, you really need the tapes. And you'll really enjoy them. Italian is a beautifully-sounding lanugage to pronounce. And the tapes make it easy and fun.

Ciao!

I recently returned from Italy after reading this book and listing to the two language tapes that accompany it. The book and tapes cover everyday subjects which arise during your trip to Italy. How to buy things in stores. How to ask directions. How to order from a menu. How to make reservations. How to talk about yourself and carry on a basic conversation. It also gives travel advice on how to use the public telephone, buy parking tokens and other juicy tidbits that will make your vacation a lot easier. (Italy is not a very efficent country, and everyday situations can become a lot more complicated than you could ever have imagined!)

When we were in Rome I found that about 95% of all Italians spoke fluent English. Most of them did not even tolerate my attempts at speaking Italian. But when we traveled to Tuscany, Florence, and the outlying Veneitian islands this book became very useful.

I highly recommend it as a succinct surivial guide if you're planning to go to Italy. I also thought that the tapes were excellent and the lessons well planned and pertinent. I carried this book with me during my trip for reference.

It will definitely help you learn some basic surivial Italian quickly and easily.

Larry McMurtry once said he based "Lonesome Dove" on a handful of reference books about the Old West. This classic compendium of cowboy terminology first published in 1936 by Ramon Adams is surely one of them. In the chapter on cowboy nicknames, there is told the story of Dishwater Martin, who like Dish Boggett in the novel, got his name by mistaking dishwater for drinking water.

And if you've read "Lonesome Dove" much of the early material in this book will be a little familiar. Adams discusses at length the duties of cowboys on the job in open rangeland, on cattle drives, and on ranches. Their manners, habits, attitudes, and codes of behavior are discussed, especially the close bond between cowboys and their horses. And interwoven through all of this are the words, terms, and phrases borrowed and invented by cowboys, observed and noted by Adams over many years as an amateur lexicographer.

I found the reading got more interesting as Adams explored topics that spilled over into storytelling and something I guess we'd call socio-linguistics today. The chapter on cooks, cooking, food, meal-time etiquette, the chuckwagon itself, and the sharp wit of cooks is especially enjoyable. Adams also makes good reading out of his chapters on cattle rustling, guns, the afore-mentioned nicknames, and (much too briefly) cowboy dances, also known as 'hoe-digs,' 'shin-digs,' 'hoe-downs,' and 'stomps.' I learned square dancing as a boy but never heard calls as arcanely mystifying as the ones Adams records here.

While Adams observes that cowboys were also notoriously profane and wildly inventive in their profanity, the mores of 1936 prevent him from giving any examples. Sad to say, that's the only chapter I have to report as missing from this otherwise entertaining and informative book.

"Cowboy Lingo" is one of those rare reference books you can read for pleasure. It opens a wide and richly detailed window into a uniquely Western world.

Ramon F. Adam's book of Cowboy lingo is a great addition to the growing library of reference books dealing with cowboy culture and the cowboy way of life. This book is great for writers and cowboy enthusiasts alike.

Here's why:

The Author Adam's divides his 'dictionary' into chapters, with specific themes ranging terms for cattle, to nicknames for people. Chapters include the commentary of modern cowboys and the author's own observations. (This is NOT a dictionary in the traditional sense, so don't expect a sterile list of terms with definitions or you might be disappointed). =-) Words and phrases are scattered throughout each chapter in no particular order.

Find out for yourself what the words "Buckaroo," "Fence-Stretcher" and "Talk Turkey" mean.

Saddle up, and prepare yourself for an exciting adventure into the ways and words of a Cowboy life!

The idioms the author chose are really popular and fun. My students love this book. We always begin our class with it. The way the idioms are grouped makes them so easy to remember (animal idioms, food idioms, etc.).

Crazy Idioms has chosen both fun and popular idioms and put them into categories that will make you both laugh and remember them -- animal idioms, dangerous idioms, color idioms, etc.

This is one of the best books ever written on idioms because the groupings make them easy to remember.

I've used this book heavily since I've bought it, and it has come through with the correct answer 95% of the time. If you do crosswords, this book is a MUST BUY. It is already one of the top reference books in my collection for doing crosswords. Fred Jackson

A huge amount of clues in puzzles today are made from proper names. The problem for most solvers is how to find them. Unless you are blessed with total recall, you need this book. The name may suggest that this book contains only the names of celebrities. In fact, this book contains the proper names of awards, books, movies -- even rivers! Each carefully categorized to make it easy to use. For puzzles constructors, this book offers you an alternative to the usual dictionaries and thesaurus' that are so often used in construction. You'll quickly and easily find new and interesting clues that will keep your fans coming back for more. This a must-have book for anyone who loves crosswords and other pencil puzzles.

Anyone looking for a copy of this large dictionary (or desk encyclopedia) of Greek and Roman myths should be aware that the text has stayed the same through various reprintings and changes of publisher as "The Meridian Handbook ..." and as simply "The Handbook of ....". Perhaps Tripp's name will be incorporated into the title when it is next reprinted. This is a first-rate non-technical reference work (no citations in Greek or Latin, no detailed etymologies, no reports on editions of the texts cited), and should be made available.

Tripp put in all in here: characters, tribes, geographical divisions and more. Character entries feature any alternate names for the character, other personae identified with the character, parentage (or creation or other origin), and a synopsis of every myth containing the character, including notations of any conflicts between tellings by different poets and mythographers. Geographical division entries feature alternate names, history of founding or establishment, and notable births, rulerships and events within them. Tripp must have invested painstaking effort to make this book this thorough and complete -- it shames all other classical mythology references guides that I've ever seen!

For those who have not seen one of these, it is indeed a wheel. It is turned to give the full conjugations of every type of verb, regular and irregular that I can think of. It also has an index on the back of a great number of other verbs indicating which verb on the wheel serves as a model.
It is an ingenious device which has been around since the 1930's--even before I began studying French :>) It is flat and is about the size of a trade paperback--so it can easily be carried around.

I first purchased a cuthbertson verb wheel in the 1970's, when I was still a high-schooler studying french. I found it invaluable in constructing grammatically correct sentences, and used it consistently through high school and even college. It is comprehensive, concise, easy to sport and thoroughly useful - a must for verb conjugators!

I bought my first in 1967 and am very glad to see it is still available. I like it because it is faster and easier to use than a paper dictionary or electronic dictionary, both of which I also have. My 1967 version is slightly out of allignment but that is no problem.

The Cuthbertson verb wheel is the best! It's the most condensed tool you can have for Spanish. It makes the language make sense--it shows how rational it is. It should be used in classrooms to provide a graphic explanation of verb usage in Spanish. My wheel is at least 10 years old and I treasure it. Now that my daughter is learning Spanish I'm buying verb wheels for her and her friends, and also for her Spanish class!

This is an excellent (and probably only) English-language guide to thorough Danish grammar. Very refined grammatical points are exemplified and explained in terms that even a non-linguist can understand. This thick book is neatly organized, the material is logically presented, and is hip with contemporary language and usage.

If you want to understand the language of Danish -- and Danes are sticklers for grammar, both Danish and English -- then you must have this book or a Danish nun as a teacher. The cross-cultural equivalent of Warriner's English; everything but sentence diagramming. Not quite Strunk & White's Elements of Style, but I need its 600-plus pages. The terminology is "rather" British (see "copulative conjunctions"), yet it even instructs how to properly form colloquial sentences -- "so" colloquial that a Danish friend to whom I had written thought I must have made a mistake because the sentence structure I had used, as a beginner, seemed to arcanely correct. In short, this book is outwardly dull but extremely useful.

Gramb's Describer's Dictionary is one of the finest books written about the written word. It's a dictionary, but it is much more than that. It's important to note the subtitle of this book (A Treasury of Terms and Literary Quotations for Readers and Writers) because this subtitle gets to the heart of what makes this book so special.

To begin, this dictionary/book lists over 2,000 useful words for describing things, animals, and people to include the following subgroups: shapes, patterns, surface and textures, size, position, relation, proportion, emblems, symbols, light, colors, building structures, terrain and landscape, climate, clouds, species adjectives (e.g., bovine and many many more), types, technical terminology, perceived attractiveness, body types, face, heads, hair, eyes, noses, ears, mouths, lips, teeth, skin coloring, hand, fingers, legs, knees, feet, jaws, walk, voices, necks, mannerisms, general appearance, and more. In other words, this dictionary will help reader, writer, and observer to economically and accurately identify his (or her) surroundings.
Just one look at the pages of this book should be enough to hook those who enjoy the art of description.

There are some great words in this book (some common, but many underused useful words are listed as well--even the most well-versed will find hundreds of gems in this book), but what really makes this book essential for those interested in accurately (and beautifully) describing their surroundings is Gramb's inclusion of passages from great literature. This gives the reader a real sense for how powerful (and beautiful) words are. Authors on display include Carver, Twain, Cummings, Updike, Baldwin, Percy, Dickens, Melville, Hawthorne, Woolf, Faulkner, Joyce, Orwell, Nabokov, and many more.

Those interested in words, description, and great writing will love this book. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Excellent Work by Grambs! If you need the cutting edge of literary description of anything from homes to people in incessant and meticulous detail. In fact, of my expansive and elaborate literary library, it is my favorite! Undeniably the best work for a beginning writer. Undeniably the best resource for writers needing to talk shop with their own souls. Irrepressible, benevolent, indeliable to the articulation of the imagination! Buy it Today!

Cameron Rowe

I'm an ESL teacher and I've used this collection for over 3 years to teach adults. I have many students who have learned using it and in my household only there are 3 of them. Yes, I've taught my own family! It's filled with great exercises, fun lessons and easy to do step-by-step class plans. Buy it, it'll change your method. With this books you don't even need the flash cards!

I'd like to learn english and I hope this book help me.