Эндрю Тэйлор - The Greeks Had a Word for It - Words You Never Knew You Can’t Do Without

My agent, James Wills, and my editor, Andrea Henry, have given me the benefit of their valuable professional help; and I’ve enjoyed working on this book even more because from the start I’ve shared it, like everything else, with my wife Penny.

And finally, Dr Tim Littlewood and the NHS team in the Department of Haematology at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital. There really isn’t a word in any language to express what you feel when people save your life.

Andrew Tayloris a linguist of questionable skill, who speaks enough French to make the French sneer at him, enough Arabic to make Arabs laugh at him, and enough Spanish to order a cup of coffee and have a hope of getting, if not necessarily what he asked for, at least a hot drink of some kind. He can ask for milk in Russian, and if he asks for directions in the street, he will understand the answer if it means ‘Straight on.’ He is better at English, in which he has written ten books, including biographies and books on language, history and poetry, and he has a lot of friends who speak a wide variety of languages and who have helped him with this book.

For more information on Andrew Taylor and his books, visit his website www.andrewtaylor.uk.net.

Françoise Sagan, La Chamade , tr. Robert Westhoff (London: Penguin Books, 1968).

This unsourced story, which Dumas is said to have enjoyed, appears in several collections of anecdotes from the nineteenth century onwards.

A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad (1896) in A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems , ed. Nick Laird (London: Penguin Classics, 2010).

E. V. Lucas, The Life of Charles Lamb (London: G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1905).

Boris Zhitkov, Što ja vídel or What I Saw , ed. Richard L. Leed and Lora Paperno (Indiana University: Slavica Publishers, 1988).

Tsurezuregusa or Essays in Idleness , tr. Donald Keene (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad (1896) in A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems , ed. Nick Laird (London: Penguin Classics, 2010).

Preface to Lyrical Ballads , 1800, in Lyrical Ballads , ed. Michael Mason (London: Routledge, Longman Annotated English Poets, 2007).

Federico García Lorca, ‘Play and Theory of the Duende’, published in Lorca – In Search of Duende , tr. Christopher Maurer (Paris: New Directions, 1998).

Nick Cave, The Secret Life of the Love Song , published in The Complete Lyrics 1978–2007 (London: Penguin, 2007).

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (New York: Knopf, 1980).

Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, Dadirri: A Reflection (http://nextwave.org.au/wp-content/uploads/Dadirri-Inner-Deep-Listening-M-R-Ungunmerr-Bauman-Refl.pdf).

George Macdonald, ‘What the Auld Fowk are Thinkin” in The Poetical Works of George Macdonald (Gloucester: Dodo Press, 2007).

Alexander Gray, ‘December Gloaming’ in Gossip – A Book of New Poems (Edinburgh: Porpoise Press, 1928).

P. G. Wodehouse, Blandings Castle (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1935).

William Morris, Hopes and Fears for Art (London: Ellis and White, 1882).

William Wordsworth, ‘To the Cuckoo’, in Lyrical Ballads , ed. Michael Mason (London: Routledge, Longman Annotated English Poets, 2007).

John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, in John Keats: The Complete Poems , ed. John Barnard (London: Penguin Classics, 1977).

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War , tr. Richard Crawley (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7142/7142-h/7142-h.htm).

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, ‘Semester at Sea’ lecture, 2007, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWZHx9DJR-M).

Speech at Memorial Service for Nelson Mandela (Johannesburg, 2013).

William Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 1 , Act V, Scene i.

Professor Susan Fiske and Mina Cikara, ‘Their pain, our pleasure: stereotype content and schadenfreude’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences , vol. 1299, September 2013.

Brian Taylor, report on Holyrood election 2007 http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/election07/scotland/2007/05/ah_bourach.html).