I know I’m not the only one who spent some quality time in elementary school looking up off-color words in the dictionary. Now you can ramp up that exercise with An Encyclopedia of Swearing, located in the Coe Reference collection. It offers social history of your favorite expletives and additional insight on usage.

My favorite entry is “Flexibility” about using curse words as various parts of speech. An excellent illustrative table is reproduced below. See if you can fill in the blanks:

Flexibility in Swearing Terms:

1. Personal: “You ____!”
2. Personal by reference: “The ___!”
3. Destinational: “____ off!”
4. Cursing: “____ you!”
5. General expletive of anger, annoyance, frustration: “____!”
6. Explicit expletive of anger, annoyance, frustration: “____ it!”
7. Capacity for adjectival extension: “___ing” or “___y”
8. Verbal usage: “to ____ about”

And for all of you who are caught up on coursework, perhaps you’ll enjoy the new addition to Coe Library: Our popular reading collection.

Mysteries, romances, popular non-fiction, all available for check out on the first floor of Coe.

Stuck in town over spring break? If you are looking for good and/or trashy books to read, check out the new Popular Reading collection at Coe Library. Here’s the official scoop:

Current, popular books are coming to University Libraries! Beginning March 12, selections from the New York Time’s bestseller list will be available for your literary enjoyment– and just in time for your Spring Break festivities. Enjoy some of your favorite fiction and non-fiction authors with titles including: Mother Daughter Wisdom by Christiane Northhrup, M.D.; Mr. Murder, by Laura Van Wormer; and You Suck: A Love Story, by Christopher Moore. On or after March 12, drop by William Robertson Coe Library and check out the new Popular Reading selection located on the first floor.

The addition of current and popular reading material to the University Libraries’ collection was made possible through a book lease with McNaughton’s Popular Reading program. 400 books will be leased from McNaughton in the coming year and over 200 of these titles will be available for check-out starting as early as next week. Additional titles will be added to the collection monthly. After a few months, books with little or no circulation will be returned to McNaughton and will be replaced with new books. Popular Reading titles can be searched in the University Libraries catalog and books are available to all patrons for a three week check-out period.

Don’t wait! University Libraries anticipates that this program will be vastly popular amongst UW students, faculty and staff members. And don’t forget that you can request University Libraries to hold a title for you if it has already been checked out by another patron.

The UW Libraries started 2007 with a bang, receiving over 900 new books already this year! The mountain of monographs was purchased with money from the Wyoming State Legislature and the books were selected to fill gaps in the library’s collection from lean budget years. Our diligent staff is working around the clock to get these books in the library catalog and on the shelf for you to check out.

The book budget is not empty yet, so request a book today!

Two new books about America’s wild horse herds arrived at the UW Libraries this week.

Large animal veterinarian Don Hoglund wrote Nobody’s Horses about the rescue of almost 2,000 wild horses from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. He offers background on the herd’s history, but the real story is the tricky political and practical matter of relocating that many horses. Cowboys, ranchers, Native Americans and the U.S. government voiced their opinions, and the free-spirited horses did not all go willingly.

Among Wild Horses features Lynne Pomeranz’s beautiful full-color photography of the mustangs of Pryor Mountain. Any horse lover will enjoy her pictures of horses roaming freely in the high desert of Wyoming and Montana.

Physicists are seeking an elegant and mathematical explanation for the beginning of the universe. Their quest to describe the world in terms of “strings“, tiny threads of energy smaller than particles, forms the basis of string theory.

Former string theorist Lee Smolin refutes the theory in his new book The Trouble with Physics. The debate over 20 years of string theory is rancorous at times, as described in “Unstrung“, an absorbing article from the New Yorker. Who knew the politics of physics could be so fascinating?

Two new books at Coe Library examine the current climate of debt for 18-30 year olds in America.

Generation Debt by Anya Kamenetz began as a series of articles in the Village Voice about social security, student loans, real life broke students, and more. Her book combines analysis, anecdotes and advice for recent and future grads.

Tamara Draut chronicles the effect of credit card debt, student loans and a rising cost of living on the current generation of graduates in Strapped. She offers loads of data on the debt crisis facing young people and concrete suggestions for decreasing debtload.

Gruesome but fascinating, The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness traces the story of Walter Freeman, inventor of and advocate for lobotomy.

In The Scratch of a Pen, historian Colin Calloway tells the story of one year in American history. In 1763, the French and Indian War ended and all of the Frontier as well as the Eastern seaboard came under British rule, causing cultural and geographic upheaval. Publishers Weekly describes it as “enthralling”, “spellbinding” and “a first rate cultural history”.