WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE

About the Book

This fun book is about words: their origins, histories, surprises, colorful use and misuse. It may alter your mental landscape for several months or less.

About the Author

Joseph Gallagher was born in Baltimore on June 19, 1929. He was ordained a priest for the Baltimore Archdiocese on May 28, 1955, and was granted early medical retirement in 1985.

He served as an editor of the Baltimore Catholic Review from 1959 to 1966, and was Archdiocesan Archivist from 1957 to 1966.

He taught at Baltimore’s St. Mary’s SemInary from 1967 until 1975, and lectured locally at Johns Hopkins University, Notre Dame College, and Loyola College. He taught at Oxford, England for Antioch International in 1977.

His chief subjects were public speaking, philosophy, poetry and other literary topics such as "The Divine Comedy" and "Shakespeare’s Sonnets."

He was translator and translation editor for "The Documents of Vatican II" (1966), and was executive editor for the bicentennial edition of "The American Catholic’s Who’s Who."

He also privately published three books of poems, "Painting on Silence" (1973), "Statements at the Scene" (1998), and an 80th Birthday Collection (2009).

In 1983 Doubleday published his book of memoirs "The Pain and the Privilege: The Diary of a City Priest." His book, "The Christian Under Pressure" (1970) was reprinted in 1988 as "How to Survive Being Human." In 2010 it underwent a second reprinting with a third publisher.

In 1987 Sheed and Ward published his booklet, "Voices of Strength and Hope for a Friend with AIDS." In 1988 Christian Classics brought out a collection of eighty of his essays under the title, "The Business of Circumference: A Kaleidoscope."

In March 1966 Triumph/Liguori Books published his "To Hell and Back with Dante." The 1999 second edition is entitled "A Modern Reader’s Guide to Dante’s Divine Comedy."

ver four decades the Baltimore Sunpapers carried 320 of his columns. Of these, The Evening Sun published 222 articles from 1953 to 1985--nearly half its lifetime. Since 1949 Baltimore’s Catholic Review published over one thousand of his editorials, columns, articles, and poems.

He has published in half a hundred other publications, including The National Catholic Reporter, America, The Catholic Digest, The New York Times, and The New Catholic Encyclopedia, and A Modern Catholic Encyclopedia.

Poems of his have appeared in the 1986/87 Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry, and The Maryland Poetry and Literary Review (1989).

He received a Master’s Degree in 1972 from the Johns Hopkins University Creative Writing Seminars.

"Shakespeare's Sonnets Freshly Phrased," his most recent book, was published in March 2011.