Training, Language and Culture

Everybody is interested in where words actually come from. The science of etymology is an important discipline in applied linguistics, and the etymology of words and phrases in English has been the subject of many popular applied linguistics books by David Crystal and others. In Bagels, Bumf and Buses Simon Horobin, Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University, has taken an interesting and unusual approach. He focuses on words we use every day without even thinking about where they come from or what they originally meant, and then organises them according to the progress of a typical day, hence the subtitle, A day in the life of the English language.