Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, agrees to loan Bassanio three thousand ducats for a term of three months. Bassanio assures Shylock that Antonio will guarantee the loan, but Shylock is doubtful because Antonio’s wealth is currently invested in business ventures that may fail. In the end, however, Shylock decides that Antonio’s guarantee of the loan will be sufficient assurance, and asks to speak with him. When Antonio arrives, Shylock, in an aside, confesses his hatred for the man. Antonio, Shylock says, is a Christian who lends money without interest, which makes more difficult the practice of usury, in which money is lent out at exorbitant interest rates. Shylock is also incensed by Antonio’s frequent public denunciations of Shylock. Antonio makes it clear to Shylock that he is not in the habit of borrowing or lending money, but has decided to make an exception on behalf of his friend Bassanio. Their conversation leads Antonio to chastise the business of usury, which Shylock defends as a way to thrive. As he calculates the interest on Bassanio’s loan, Shylock remembers the many times that Antonio has cursed him, calling him a “misbeliever, cut-throat, dog / And spit upon [his] Jewish gaberdine” (I.iii.107–108). Antonio responds that he is likely to do so again, and insists that Shylock lend him the money as an enemy. Such an arrangement, Antonio claims, will make it easier for Shylock to exact a harsh penalty if the loan is not repaid. Assuring Antonio that he means to be friends, Shylock offers to make the loan without interest. Instead, he suggests, seemingly in jest, that Antonio forfeit a pound of his own flesh should the loan not be repaid in due time. Bassanio warns Antonio against entering such an agreement, but Antonio assures him that he will have no trouble repaying the debt, as his ships will soon bring him wealth that far exceeds the value of the loan. Shylock attempts to dismiss Bassanio’s suspicions, asking what profit he stands to make by procuring a pound of Antonio’s flesh. As Shylock heads off to the notary’s office to sign the bond, Antonio remarks on Shylock’s newfound generosity: “The Hebrew will turn Christian; he grows kind” (I.iii.174). Bassanio remains suspicious of the arrangement, but Antonio reminds him that his ships will arrive within the next two months. Analysis Shylock is an arresting presence on the stage, and although Antonio may be the character for whom the play is named, it is Shylock who has come to dominate the imaginations of critics and audiences alike. Shylock’s physical presence in the play is actually not so large, as he speaks fewer lines than other characters and does not even appear in the play’s final act. However, in many ways, the play belongs to Shylock. The use of a Jew as the central villain was not unknown to Renaissance comedy, as evidenced by The Jew of Malta, a wildly popular play by Shakespeare’s contemporary Christopher Marlowe, which revolves around a malevolent, bloodthirsty Jewish character named Barabas. Shylock, however, differs in that his malice seems to stem, at least in part, from the unkindness of his Christian colleagues. Exactly how to read Shylock has been a matter of some debate, and even the most persuasive scholars would be hard-pressed to call him a flattering portrait of a Jew. One could certainly argue, however, that Shylock receives far less of a stock portrayal than what was common in Shakespeare’s time, and that, given the constant degradation he endures, we can even feel something akin to sympathy for him.

The history of English is conventionally, if perhaps too neatly, divided into three periods usually called Old English (or Anglo-Saxon), Middle English, and Modern English. The earliest period begins with the migration of certain Germanic tribes from the continent to Britain in the fifth century A.D., though no records of their language survive from before the seventh century, and it continues until the end of the eleventh century or a bit later. By that time Latin, Old Norse (the language of the Viking invaders), and especially the Anglo-Norman French of the dominant class after the Norman Conquest in 1066 had begun to have a substantial impact on the lexicon, and the well-developed inflectional system that typifies the grammar of Old English had begun to break down. The following brief sample of Old English prose illustrates several of the significant ways in which change has so transformed English that we must look carefully to find points of resemblance between the language of the tenth century and our own. It is taken from Aelfric's "Homily on St. Gregory the Great" and concerns the famous story of how that pope came to send missionaries to convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity after seeing Anglo-Saxon boys for sale as slaves in Rome: Eft he axode, hu ðære ðeode nama wære þe hi of comon. Him wæs geandwyrd, þæt hi Angle genemnode wæron. Þa cwæð he, "Rihtlice hi sind Angle gehatene, for ðan ðe hi engla wlite habbað, and swilcum gedafenað þæt hi on heofonum engla geferan beon." A few of these words will be recognized as identical in spelling with their modern equivalents—he, of, him, for, and, on—and the resemblance of a few others to familiar words may be guessed—nama to name, comon to come, wære to were, wæs to was—but only those who have made a special study of Old English will be able to read the passage with understanding. The sense of it is as follows: Again he [St. Gregory] asked what might be the name of the people from which they came. It was answered to him that they were named Angles. Then he said, "Rightly are they called Angles because they have the beauty of angels, and it is fitting that such as they should be angels' companions in heaven."

Old English myrge "pleasing, agreeable, pleasant, sweet; pleasantly, melodiously, " from Proto-Germanic *murgijaz, which probably originally meant "short-lasting, " (cf. Old High German murg "short, " Gothic gamaurgjan "to shorten"), from PIE *mreghu- "short" (see brief (adj.)). The only exact cognate for meaning outside English was Middle Dutch mergelijc "joyful." Connection to "pleasure" is likely via notion of "making time fly, that which makes the time seem to pass quickly" (cf. German Kurzweil "pastime, " literally "a short time;" Old Norse skemta "to amuse, entertain, amuse oneself, " from skamt, neuter of skammr "short"). There also was a verbal form in Old English, myrgan "be merry, rejoice." For vowel evolution, see bury (v.). Bot vchon enle we wolde were fyf, þe mo þe myryer. [c.1300]The word had much wider senses in Middle English, e.g. "pleasant-sounding" (of animal voices), "fine" (of weather), "handsome" (of dress), "pleasant-tasting" (of herbs). Merry-bout "an incident of sexual intercourse" was low slang from 1780. Merry-begot "illegitimate" (adj.), "bastard" (n.) is from 1785. Merrie England (now frequently satirical or ironic) is 14c. meri ingland, originally in a broader sense of "bountiful, prosperous." Merry Monday was a 16c. term for "the Monday before Shrove Tuesday" (Mardi Gras).

In this Perspectives article, Anna Bernacka considers the role of the translator as a mediator between cultures. Rather than merely supplanting one form of words for another, the translator has the capacity to enhance our understanding of development issues and indigenous cultures by mediating ideas across cultural and national boundaries. The article presents case studies where translation has played a crucial role in bringing new learning and wider understanding to rich, indigenous cultures in India and South Africa thereby enabling languages to become more widely ‘utilized and promoted through education, working towards formal protection by the respective state constitutions and curricula’. Introduction Translation is not merely an interlinguistic process. It is more complex than replacing source language text with target language text and includes cultural and educational nuances that can shape the options and attitudes of recipients. Translations are never produced in a cultural or political vacuum and cannot be isolated from the context in which the texts are embedded (Dingwaney and Maier, 1995:3). As David Katan in Translating Cultures puts it: ‘...the translator is a bilingual mediating agent between monolingual communication participants in two different language communities’ (2004: 16). Therefore translators not only have to be intermediaries between different language systems, but also have to be intercultural mediators – or as it has been stated by Aniela Korzeniowska and Piotr Kuhiwczak in Successful Polish-English Translation Tricks of the Trade – they have to be both ‘bilingual and bicultural’ (2006: 71). Thus, translation performs a crucial role in our understanding of the cultural ‘other’. The role of the translator in mediating source ideas across cultural and national boundaries places him or her in a unique position in particular for understanding a range of development issues. Translating narratives from the global South is an invaluable source of knowledge about unfamiliar languages, indigenous cultures and experiences, and is immensely useful for gaining an understanding of non-European societies. Moreover, translation can also have a critical influence in politics and can act as an agent for reconciliation or social integration. Translations can therefore have a distinct effect on how global and human rights issues can be conveyed and communicated. The aim of this article is to emphasise different aspects of the translation process that are often misunderstood during a mainly linguistic and uncreative operation where one set of textual material is replaced by another. I will firstly focus on ‘unifying’ aspects of translation in view of the current situation in South Africa where there are eleven official languages recognized by the constitution, but where English has become a dominant language. Secondly, I will discuss the newly discovered Koro language and the difficulties that accompany its translation, a perception based on the Whorfian hypothesis that language is shaped by the world in which we live. This is where the translation of a language will allow us to open the doors to unknown cultural and linguistic environments. The results will arguably introduce rich developing world reference points to translation methodology and development education. Finally, in summary, I will stress the translator’s creative role, which often involves creating a new vocabulary in order to successfully convey the message of the source text. In doing this the interaction between the disciplines of translation studies and development education will become more apparent. Interpreting Meaning Translations are never a product of a cultural void and there is a general agreement between translation scholars that ‘in seeking to transport words (and sentences and texts) from one language to another, the translator cannot merely search for equivalent words in the target language to render the meaning of the source’ (Dingwaney and Maier, 1995: 3). Therefore, as stated by Aniela Korzeniowska and Piotr Kuhiwczak, translators not only have to be intermediaries between different language systems, but also have to be intercultural mediators. The role of the translator is to mediate source ideas across cultural and national boundaries placing him or her in a unique position to understand various development issues. Thus translating narratives from the global South is an invaluable source of knowledge about unfamiliar languages and cultural experiences and is immensely useful for gaining an understanding of different societies for development education purposes in particular.

The Tyndale Bible generally refers to the body of biblical translations by William Tyndale. Tyndale’s Bible is credited with being the first English translation to work directly from Hebrew and Greek texts. Furthermore, it was the first English biblical translation that was mass-produced as a result of new advances in the art of printing. The term Tyndale's Bible is not strictly correct, because Tyndale never published a complete Bible. Prior to his execution Tyndale had only finished translating the entire New Testament and roughly half of the Old Testament. Of the latter, the Pentateuch, Jonah and a revised version of the book of Genesis were published during his lifetime. His other Old Testament works were first used in the creation of the Matthew Bible and also heavily influenced every major English translation of the Bible that followed. History [edit] The chain of events that led to the creation of Tyndale’s New Testament possibly began in 1522, the year Tyndale acquired a copy of Martin Luther’s German New Testament. Inspired by Luther’s work, Tyndale began a translation into English using a Greek text "compiled by Erasmus from several manuscripts older and more authoritative than the Latin Vulgate" of St. Jerome (A.D. c.340-420), the only translation authorized by the Roman Catholic Church. Tyndale made his purpose known to the Bishop of London at the time, Cuthbert Tunstall, but was refused permission to produce this "heretical" text. Thwarted in England, Tyndale moved to the continent. A partial edition was put into print in 1525 in Cologne. But before the work could be completed, Tyndale was betrayed to the authorities and forced to flee to Worms, where the first complete edition of his New Testament was published in 1526. Two revised versions were later published in 1534 and 1536, both personally revised by Tyndale himself. After his death in 1536 Tyndale’s works were revised and reprinted numerous times and are reflected in more modern versions of the Bible, including, perhaps most famously, the King James Bible. Tyndale's Pentateuch was published at Antwerp by Merten de Keyser in 1530. His English version of the book of Jonah was published the following year. This was followed by his revised version of the book of Genesis in 1534. Tyndale translated additional Old Testament books including Joshua, Judges, first and second Samuel, first and second Kings and first and second Chronicles, but they were not published and have not survived in their original forms. When Tyndale was martyred these works came to be in the possession of one his associates John Rogers. These translations would be influential in the creation of the Matthew Bible which was published in 1537. Tyndale used a number of sources when carrying out his translations of both the New and Old Testaments. When translating the New Testament, he referred to the third edition (1522) of Erasmus’s Greek New Testament, often referred to as the Received Text. Tyndale also used Erasmus' Latin New Testament, as well as Luther’s German version and the Vulgate. Scholars believe that Tyndale stayed away from using Wycliffe's Bible as a source because he didn’t want his English to reflect that which was used prior to the Renaissance. The sources Tyndale used for his translation of the Pentateuch however are not known for sure. Scholars believe that Tyndale used either the Hebrew Pentateuch or the Polyglot Bible, and may have referred to the Septuagint. It is suspected that his other Old Testament works were translated directly from a copy of the Hebrew Bible. He also made abundant use of Greek and Hebrew grammars. Reaction of the Catholic Church [edit] Tyndale’s translations were condemned in England, where his work was banned and copies burned. Catholic officials, prominently Thomas More, charged that he had purposely mistranslated the ancient texts in order to promote anti-clericalism and heretical views, In particular they cited the terms “church”, “priest”, “do penance” and “charity”, which became in the Tyndale translation “congregation”, “senior” (changed to "elder" in the revised edition of 1534), “repent” and “love”, challenging key doctrines of the Roman Church. Betrayed to church officials in 1536, he was defrocked in an elaborate public ceremony and turned over to the civil authorities to be strangled to death and burned at the stake. His last words are said to have been, "Lord! Open the King of England's eyes."

Where did this meme start, and have the people who spread it really studied the history of English? Let’s go back, way back, before the birth of Greenwich Mean Time…. The first people to arrive on the island we now call Britain were the Celts (also called the Britons). They were soon joined by Scots, Picts, and some Latin dudes who wandered over from the Roman Empire. Then, round about the fifth century, the Germanic Angles, Saxons, and Jutes arrived from the continent, through what are now known as Holland, Germany, and Denmark. These barbarous tribes brought with them the seax (a terrifying blade from which the Saxons got their name) and a language that had been mixing it up with Latin for centuries. As linguist David Crystal points out in, the vocabulary of English “has never been purely Anglo-Saxon, even in its Anglo-Saxon period”! Anglo-Saxon did eventually form the basic stock of Old English, enlivened with a smattering of Celtic and Latin words. St. Augustine brought new ingredients from Rome, Danes added some sustenance of their own, and then the Normans spiced things up with French and more Latin. By the time of Shakespeare, English was a rich verbal stew—then the Bard added all kinds of coinages to the pot. That didn’t stop early language mavens from craving a pure, purée-smooth English. In the sixteenth century, John Cheke suggested that words with Latin and Greek origins be replaced by words with Old English roots, and in the nineteenth, authors like Dickens and Hardy sang the virtues of an all-Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. In the twentieth century, George Orwell took up the banner, arguing in “Politics and the English Language” that “bad writers are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin and Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.” In other words, good writers don’t rely on words with Latin roots (or, for that matter, any non-Germanic roots). Orwell’s point—and it’s a fine one—was that straightforward, punchy words should trump pompous, polysyllabic ones. Point taken. And it’s true that a lot of obtuse abstractions (ameliorate, disintermediation, subaqueous ) have Latin roots. Second point taken. But here’s the thing: English has always borrowed nice, crisp, short, specific words from other languages. Of the following 24 words, can you tell which are Germanic in origin and which ones were snatched from Latin: belt, bin, cat, cook, craft, cup, day, dog, earth, god, gold, home, light, pan, pit, pot, red, sack, sock, stop, sun, wall, wife, work? See the answers here.) And what’s the matter with early imports from Scandinavia ( cake, crooked, dregs ), France (bacon, ginger, proud), and Frisia, aka Holland before it was Holland ( island )? (Props to David Crystal for most of my examples.) Today 80 percent of our vocabulary comes from “foreign” sources, including these perfectly good if very un-Anglo-Saxon words: ballot (from Italian), banshee (Scots Gaelic), bungalow (Hindi), garage (French), gong (Javanese), goulash (Hungarian), junta (Spanish), kahuna (Hawaiian), kiosk (Turkish), llama (Quechua), marmalade (Portuguese), mentsh (Yiddish), robot (Czech), slim (Dutch), sofa (Arabic), tomato (Nahuatl), tycoon (Japanese), window (Old Icelandic), yen (as in desire, Chinese).

And it seems increasingly common. Recently, a patient came in to my practice complaining of severe upper back pain. He woke up and was experiencing severe, acute, upper back muscle strain. I told him I believe the pain is due to the hours he was spending hunched over his cell phone. Diagnosis: Text neck. Of course, this posture of bending your neck to look down does not occur only when texting. For years, we've all looked down to read. The problem with texting is that it adds one more activity that causes us to look down—and people tend to do it for much longer periods. It is especially concerning because young, growing children could possibly cause permanent damage to their cervical spines that could lead to lifelong neck pain. What are the symptoms associated with text neck? Text neck most commonly causes neck pain and soreness. In addition, looking down at your cell phone too much each day can lead to: Upper back pain ranging from a chronic, nagging pain to sharp, severe upper back muscle spasms. Shoulder pain and tightness, possibly resulting in painful shoulder muscle spasm. If a cervical nerve becomes pinched, pain and possibly neurological symptoms can radiate down your arm and into your hand. I believe, as some studies suggest, text neck may possibly lead to chronic problems due to early onset of arthritis in the neck. Article continues below Poor neck posture of all kinds, not just from texting, can lead to strain or sprain. Watch: Neck Strains and Sprains Video How common is text neck? A recent study shows that 79% of the population between the ages 18 and 44 have their cell phones with them almost all the time—with only 2 hours of their waking day spent without their cell phone on hand.1 How is text neck treated? First, prevention is key. Here are several pieces of advice for preventing the development or advancement of text neck: Hold your cell phone at eye level as much as possible. The same holds true for all screens—laptops and tablets should also be positioned so the screen is at eye level and you don't have to bend your head forward or look down to view it. Take frequent breaks from your phone and laptop throughout the day. For example, set a timer or alarm that reminds you to get up and walk around every 20 to 30 minutes. If you work in an office, make sure your screen is set up so that when you look at it you are looking forward, with your head positioned squarely in line with your shoulders and spine. The bottom line is to avoid looking down with your head bent forward for extended periods throughout the day. Spend a whole day being mindful of your posture—is your head bent forward when you drive? When you watch TV? Any prolonged period when your head is looking down is a time when you are putting excessive strain on your neck. Next, rehabilitation is important. Many people don't know this, but you need to have strong core muscles—the abdominal and lower back muscles—to support your upper body, including your neck. Your core muscles usually do not get enough exercise during normal daily activities, so you need to do specific exercises to target these muscles. You also need strong and flexible muscles the neck to minimize strain on your cervical spine and help support the weight of your head. Again, your neck will not get sufficient stretching and strengthening during normal daily activities, so it is best to learn specific neck exercises with the help of a health professional.

The Meteor automatic evaluation metric scores machine translation hypotheses by aligning them to one or more reference translations. Alignments are based on exact, stem, synonym, and paraphrase matches between words and phrases. Segment and system level metric scores are calculated based on the alignments between hypothesis-reference pairs. The metric includes several free parameters that are tuned to emulate various human judgment tasks including WMT ranking and NIST adequacy. The current version also includes a tuning configuration for use with MERT and MIRA. Meteor has extended support (paraphrase matching and tuned parameters) for the following languages: English, Czech, German, French, Spanish, and Arabic. Meteor is implemented in pure Java and requires no installation or dependencies to score MT output. On average, hypotheses are scored at a rate of 500 segments per second per CPU core. Meteor consistently demonstrates high correlation with human judgments in independent evaluations such as EMNLP WMT 2011 and NIST Metrics MATR 2010. Meteor X-ray uses XeTeX and Gnuplot to create visualizations of alignment matrices and score distributions from the output of Meteor. These visualizations allow easy comparison of MT systems or system configurations and facilitate in-depth performance analysis by examination of underlying Meteor alignments. Final output is in PDF form with intermediate TeX and Gnuplot files preserved for inclusion in reports or presentations. The Examples section includes sample alignment matrices and score distributions from Meteor X-ray. Meteor (current version, including paraphrase tables and X-ray): Michael Denkowski and Alon Lavie, "Meteor Universal: Language Specific Translation Evaluation for Any Target Language", Proceedings of the EACL 2014 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, 2014 [PDF] [bib] Older versions of Meteor: Michael Denkowski and Alon Lavie, "Meteor 1.3: Automatic Metric for Reliable Optimization and Evaluation of Machine Translation Systems", Proceedings of the EMNLP 2011 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, 2011 [PDF] [bib] Michael Denkowski and Alon Lavie, "METEOR-NEXT and the METEOR Paraphrase Tables: Improved Evaluation Support For Five Target Languages" , Proceedings of the ACL 2010 Joint Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation and Metrics MATR, 2010 [PDF] [bib] Michael Denkowski and Alon Lavie, "Extending the METEOR Machine Translation Evaluation Metric to the Phrase Level" , Proceedings of NAACL/HLT, 2010 [PDF] [bib] Alon Lavie and Michael Denkowski, "The METEOR Metric for Automatic Evaluation of Machine Translation", Machine Translation, 2010 [PDF] Abhaya Agarwal and Alon Lavie, "METEOR, M-BLEU and M-TER: Evaluation Metrics for High-Correlation with Human Rankings of Machine Translation Output", Proceedings of the ACL 2008 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, 2008 [PDF] Alon Lavie and Abhaya Agarwal, "METEOR: An Automatic Metric for MT Evaluation with High Levels of Correlation with Human Judgments", Proceedings of the ACL 2007 Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, 2007 [PDF] Satanjeev Banerjee and Alon Lavie, "METEOR: An Automatic Metric for MT Evaluation with Improved Correlation with Human Judgments" , Proceedings of the ACL 2005 Workshop on Intrinsic and Extrinsic Evaluation Measures for MT and/or Summarization, 2005 [PDF]

The ghost kept walking. Hamlet held it in sight, afraid that it would disappear. ‘Where are you leading me to?’ he called. ‘Speak. I won’t go any further.’ The ghost stopped and turned. Hamlet found himself looking into the blank, staring white face of the man who had been his father. ‘Listen.’ It was his father’s voice, but cold and expressionless. ‘I will.’ ‘The time has almost come when I must surrender myself to sulphur and tormenting flames.’ ‘Alas, poor ghost!’ ‘Don’t pity me. Listen carefully to what I’m going to tell you.’ ‘Speak. I have to hear it.’ ‘You will also have to revenge when you hear it.’ ‘What?’ ‘I am your father’s spirit, doomed for a certain time to walk the night, and for the day to burn in fires, till the foul crimes done during my lifetime have been burnt and purged away. But that I am forbidden to tell the secrets of my prison-house I could tell a tale whose lightest word would shrivel up your soul, freeze your young blood, make your eyes start from their sockets and your hair stand up on end like the quills of a frightened porcupine. But this eternal torture is not for ears of flesh and blood. Listen, oh listen! If you ever loved your dear father…’ The ghost broke off and let out an anguished wail. ‘Oh God!’ It was too much for Hamlet. ‘…revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.’ ‘Murder!’ ‘Murder most foul, as murder always is, but this one was most foul, strange and unnatural.’ ‘Tell me quickly so that, with wings as swift as meditation or thoughts of love, I may sweep to my revenge.’ ‘I find you willing, the ghost said, ‘and if you didn’t act on this you would be more drowsy than the fat weed that roots itself in the comfort of the banks of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. Now Hamlet, hear: It’s been reported that, sleeping in my orchard, a snake bit me. So the ear of Denmark has been grossly abused by a fraudulent account of my death.’ The ghost paused again and seemed to be overwhelmed by the thought he had just pronounced. Then his voice came again, as steady and cold as it had been up until now. ‘But know this, you noble youth. The serpent that did take your father’s life now wears his crown.’ ‘Oh, I had almost thought that!’ exclaimed Hamlet. ‘My uncle!’ ‘Yes, that incestuous, that adulterous, beast. With the witchcraft of his intelligence, with his traitorous qualities – oh evil intelligence and qualities that have the power to seduce like that – he forced the will of my most seeming-virtuous queen to his shameful lust. Oh Hamlet, what a falling-off was there!’ Hamlet stood in shocked silence. The ghost continued: ‘From me, whose love was of that dignity that it was of the same high order as the vow I made to her in marriage, to descend to the level of a wretch whose natural gifts were poor compared with mine! But in the same way as virtue will never allow itself to be seduced by lewdness, even if it comes in the shape of heaven, lust, though disguised as a radiant angel, preys on the garbage to be found in a holy bed.’

In 1905, the Oxford University Press published the sixth and final volume of The English Dialect Dictionary, a compilation of local British words and phrases dating from the 18th and 19th centuries. The EDD set out to record all those words used too sparsely and too locally to make the cut in the Oxford English Dictionary, and by 1905, more than 70, 000 entries from right across the British Isles had been compiled, defined, and explained. The entire enterprise was personally overseen (and, in its early stages at least, partly funded) by Joseph Wright, a self-taught linguist and etymologist who went from attending French and Latin night classes while working in a textiles factory to becoming Professor of Philology at Oxford University. Although Wright published a number of other works during his lifetime, The English Dialect Dictionary is by far his greatest achievement, and is still regarded as one of the finest dictionaries of its type. The 50 words listed here are all genuine entries taken from Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary as well as a number of other equally fantastic local British glossaries, including John Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808), Francis Grose’s Glossary of Provincial and Local Words Used in England (1787), and John Ray’s Collection of South and East-Country Words (1691). Ranging from the bizarre to the useful, they all would make a brilliant addition to anyone’s vocabulary. 1. APTYCOCK: A quick-witted or intelligent young man. (SW England) 2. BANG-A-BONK: It might not look like it, but this is a verb meaning “to sit lazily on a riverbank.” (Gloucestershire) 3. BAUCHLE: A name for an old worn out shoe, and in particular one that no longer has a heel—although it was also used figuratively to refer to a pointless or useless person. (Ireland) 4. CLIMB-TACK: A cat that likes to walk along high shelves or picture rails is a climb-tack. (Yorkshire) 5. CLOMPH: To walk in shoes which are too large for your feet. (Central England) 6. CRAMBO-CLINK: Also known as crambo-jink, this is a word for poor quality poetry—or, figuratively, a long-winded and ultimately pointless conversation. (Scots) 7. CRINKIE-WINKIE: A groundless misgiving, or a poor reason for not doing something. (Scots) 8. CRUM-A-GRACKLE: Any awkward or difficult situation. (SW England) 9. CRUMPSY: Short-tempered and irritable. Probably a local variation of “grumpy.” (Central England) 10. CUDDLE-ME-BUFF: Why call it beer when you can call it cuddle-me-buff? (Yorkshire) 11. CULF: The loose feathers that come out of a mattress or cushion—and which “adhere to the clothes of any one who has lain upon it, ” according to Wright. (Cornwall)