Anatoly Liberman is professor of Germanic philology at the University of Minnesota. He has written more than twenty books, including A Bibliography of English Etymology and An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology (both from Minnesota).

"Spanning more than three centuries, Take My Word for It is a fascinating, one-of-a-kind window into the surprisingly short history of idioms in English. Widely known for his studies of word origins, Anatoly Liberman explains more than one thousand idioms, both popular and obscure, occurring in both American and British standard English and including many regional expressions"--