John Ciardi, in his Browser's Dictionaries, enlightens and entertains us while he pulls us inside the maze of the English language. His three dictionaries probe expressions and captivating facts to encourage a reader’s curiosity. The words and phrases, with a wide and free range, are chosen to show their use and misuse, their origins, and the legends they sprouted from. These books are not written to please an academic community but to show a good time to readers who like to play with words.

Let’s take the word hell as an example, since Ciardi himself seems to have an obsession with the subject. Ciardi says hell is the Teutonic word for Hades. Then he goes into mythology and describes, who, what, where -as to gods and goddesses- were involved in the underworld. Afterwards he takes us into history of beliefs and Dante’s Inferno. Then, he makes a second entry for hell and shows why the word became taboo, giving many examples such as: what the hell!; go to hell; get the hell out of here; raise hell; Hell’s Canyon; Hell’s Kitchen; give ’im/’em hell; catch hell; hell around; a helluva time; hell diver; heller; hellish; hell hound/ hound of hell; helikin; like a bat out of hell; hot as the hinges of hell; not till hell freezes over.

I found some word origins to be truly amusing. Did you know “touch and go” came from pilot training and “budge” came from a woman’s bosom?

browsing or reading from beginning to end for people who love words, their origins and meanings.

the way the book captures the regular reader and not just the people in academia.

look through the other two volumes again.

John Ciardi was born in 1916 in Boston, Massachusetts, of Italian ethnicity. He attended Bates and Tufts Colleges and he received a master's degree from the University of Michigan. He is the author of more than forty volumes of poetry. Among them, How Does a Poem Mean? (1959), by Ciardi was a textbook for poetry courses. He also translated Dante's Divine Comedy and served as editor of Saturday Review.

John Ciardi taught English at the University of Kansas City, served in the Air Force, went on to teach at Harvard University in 1946, and a few years later, accepted a post in Rutgers University.

He left academia in 1961 to concentrate on his writing, even though he kept up with educating and enlightening the public through lectures, readings and such. "I Met a Man Who Sang the Sillies (1961)" was a tremendously popular children’s poetry book. Ciardi was a well-liked poet with sentimental and romantic verse who won many awards. He died of a heart attack in 1986 in Edison, New Jersey.

His epitaph says:

"Here, time concurring (and it does);
Lies Ciardi. If no kingdom come,
A kingdom was.
Such as it was,
This one beside it is a slum."

He wrote his epitaph himself.

Some of his poetry books are: Homeward to America (1940), Live Another Day (1949), A Genesis (1967), The Birds of Pompeii (1985)

I like words and I like to take them apart to see where they are coming from or how they originated. John Ciardi, the writer of these books, also liked to work with etymology and that’s why he wrote these series.
reading it or looking through it is an amusing way to pass time for me. This book is the second volume in a series. The first and the third volumes are just as good.

I heartily recommend the Second Browser’s Dictionary, its predecessor, and its successor. These three volumes are a lot of fun to read through either from beginning to end or to browse leisurely from here and there.

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