Vandals, Scapegoats, and Bootleggers: The Curious Origins of Everyday Words - Paperback

by Andrew Thompson (Author)

Discover the fascinating backstories of 400 words

The English language is anything but boring! Vandals, Scapegoats and Bootleggers takes you on an etymological journey through history, myth, religion, war, sports, literature, and beyond to uncover how common expressions came to be. In quick yet captivating entries, you'll find the intriguing details, bizarre twists, forgotten characters, and curious coincidences that shaped the conversations we have every day.

- Boycott was the surname of a despised nineteenth-century landlord shunned into exile by his entire town

- A deadline was the fatal boundary drawn around military prisons during the Civil War

- The designer of the bikini named it for the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands to ride the publicity wave of the headline-making nuclear tests there

- Turncoat began with the nervous Duke of Saxony creating a reversible coat so he could safely walk between French and English armies warring on his land

With tales that are weird, witty, and wonderfully unexpected, Vandals, Scapegoats, and Bootleggers reveals that even seemingly simple words have a story to tell.

Author Biography

Born in Australia in 1972, Andrew Thompson lived in London, England for 12 years where he practiced law, before embarking on a three year world tour that took him to 38 countries, including all of the habitable continents. Andrew has written eight bestselling trivia books, Why Skies are Blue and Parrots Talk, Why Do Kamikaze Pilots Wear Helmets?, What Did We Use Before Toilet Paper?, Can Holding in a Fart Kill You?, Hair of the Dog to Paint the Town Red, Why Do Roller Coasters Make You Puke?, Why Does Bright Light Make You Sneeze?, and Spiders, Clowns, and Great Mole Rats, as well as the novel The Hemingway Solution, the travel memoir Dog Days, and a book about misused words The Suppository of all Wisdom.