Speaking Freely: A Guided Tour of American English from Plymouth Rock to Silicon Valley.

Stuart Berg Flexner and Anne H. Soukhanov. New York: Oxford, 1997.

This work, drawing on the late Stuart Berg Flexner's two most popular books - I Hear America Talking and Listening to America - provides a sweeping look at the richness and astonishing variety of American English. Co-author Anne H. Soukhanov, a leading American lexicographer who writes the "Word Watch" column in the Atlantic Monthly, has made sure Speaking Freely is up-to-date by adding lots of new material covering the many changes that have taken place in language over the past twenty years.

In Speaking Freely you will read about the history and origin of many of our most intriguing and curious words along with the cultural conditions that produced them. For example, in the chapter titled "Booze: America's Love Affair with the Bottle," we learn that "drunk" has more synonyms than almost any other English word. Scholars list at least 2,000. Indeed, Benjamin Franklin was the first American to publish a compilation of such terms. Some examples and when they entered the language: inebriated (1609), loaded (1886), blotto (1917), smashed (1959), and wasted (1984).

A hangover, the result of a drinking spree, has also been called the "katzenjammers" (from the German for cat's wailing), the "DT's" (an abbreviation of the Latin "delirium tremens" - trembling delirium), the "heebie-jeebies" (from the 1923 comic strip "Barney Google") and "the screaming meemies" (origin unknown).

Those who frequently get drunk are sometimes referred to as "tipplers." The first recorded were two fellows who came before the authorities in England in 1396 for violating the liquor laws. (At that time "tippler" meant a tavern keeper; it later came to apply to a steady customer.) Researchers have traced the term for those who never touch the stuff, "teetotaler," to a speech given by an Englishman in 1833 promoting abstinence from intoxicating liquors.

With chapters on such diverse topics as Americanisms, cyberspace, advertising, fighting words, geography, economics, sex, crime, gender, and generation gaps, and with over 400 images and many quotations from influential Americans, Speaking Freely is a vast compendium of entertaining and informative erudition.