That’s Disgusting !: The Story of How Britain Learned to Say “Disgusting

Britain has one word for "disgusting"-and roughly four hundred years' worth of better ones.Why do the Scots have an entire vocabulary for the feeling of nearly being sick? How did an innocent word for smoke become something that stinks? Why can food be rank, foosty, rancid, manky or enough to give a camel the dry boak? And where, precisely, did words such as boggin, bowfin and scunner come from?That's Disgusting! takes a warm, witty and thoroughly British journey through the language of revulsion. Moving from smell and nausea through dirt, decay, insult, Scots dialect and moral judgement, Simon From Scotland uncovers the surprising histories behind the words we use when "disgusting" simply is not strong enough.Along the way, discover: - Why "disgust" began as a word about taste - How "revolting" travelled from political rebellion to physical recoil - Why "gross" once meant nothing more offensive than large - The ancient origins of boak, scunner and reek - How words for dirt eventually became judgements about people - A fully sourced glossary of nearly fifty wonderfully unpleasant expressionsWritten in a warm, dry and unmistakably comic voice, this is an affectionate celebration of Britain's extraordinary talent for describing things that smell terrible, taste worse or ought never to have been discovered at the back of the fridge.For language lovers, lovers of British and Scottish humour, amateur etymologists-and anyone who has ever emerged from a public toilet, gone quietly pale, and said: "I wouldn't go in there."