The vocabulary of the past is always intriguing, especially when it is
no longer used in modern English. Many of the words and phrases that
were popular in Victorian England may sound foreign today, but looking
to original sources and texts can yield fascinating insight, especially
when we see how vocabulary was pilloried by the satirists of the day.
In That's the Ticket for Soup!, the renowned language expert David
Crystal returns to the pages of Punch magazine, England's widely read
satirical publication. Crystal has pored through the pages of Punch
between its first issue in 1841 and the death of Queen Victoria in 1901
and extracted the articles and cartoons that poked fun at the jargon of
the day. Here we have Victorian high and low society, with its
fashionable and unfashionable slang, its class awareness on display in
the vocabulary of steam engines, motor cars, and other products of the
Industrial Revolution. Then, as now, people had strong feelings about
the flood of new words entering English. Swearing, new street names, and
the many borrowings from French provoked continual irritation and
mockery, as did the Americanisms increasingly encountered in the British
press. In addition to these entertaining examples, Crystal includes
commentary on the context of the times and informative glossaries. This
original and amusing collection reveals how many present-day feelings
about words can be traced to the satire of a century ago.
