The brilliant and highly unconventional linguist Keith Foley died of a brain tumour in 2005 at the tragically early age of 53, and this Gedenkschrift contains many touching tributes to Keith's scholarship and to the affection that he inspired in both colleagues and students. It is dedicated to Keith's two sons, Christopher and Stephen, who enthusiastically supported the project.

Ten academic papers are included in the volume: eight of them were delivered at a one-day conference held on 27 October 2007 as a tribute to Keith on what would have been his 55^th birthday; two others (Parra, Woollen) were added later. These ten contributions are flanked at the beginning by a tribute from Joseph Farrell in which he also recalls Keith's three major publications (‘labours of love’), and at the end by David Kinloch's poem in memory of Keith Foley – ‘A Rum Fish’ – recalling Keith's love and extensive knowledge of fish-names. The collection of papers shows a deep affection for Keith and great admiration for his erudition, as well as betraying a vibrant university department in which Keith obviously thrived.

The contributions closely reflect Keith's wide-ranging interests: in his ‘Les Fourberies de ce calepin’, Alan Morris studies puns, wordplay and allusions in the French detective novel; Cédric Moreau's ‘Nutmeg and Panenka’ discusses the vocabulary of football; Sue Harris (another of Keith's students) discusses the emergence of sound cinema in her ‘Films parlants, chantants et dansants’. In his ‘Commer: poems like paintings’, David Kinloch (who wrote the preface to Keith's Illustrated Dictionary of French Similes) examines the role of ekphrasis in describing art; Mary McAllester Jones (Strathclyde's Bachelard expert) contributes ‘Bachelard on being in linguistic space’, while David Johnston (who taught for ten years at Strathclyde) considers the model of the Toledo translation school (and modern misconceptions of its role) in ‘Urbs parva sed loco munita’ – the title is Livy's description of Toledo, ‘a small city but fortified by its position’); Mar Parra-Olmedo studies Spanish translations of The Office in ‘¿Lost in translation?’ In his ‘Animal attributes in Middle and modern French’ the late Mike Freeman ventures some possible additions from earlier literature to Keith's French Bestiary; Geoff Woollen's ‘Romancing the stone’ is a study of inscriptions in literature; Walter Redfern studies the nature of humour in Jules Vallès in his ‘Blague art’ (Blackguard!), and finally David Kinloch's poem ‘A rum fish’, hilarious and tender, appropriately rounds off the collection.

As befits a collection of articles in memory of an accomplished mirthmeister, I frequently found myself laughing out loud and remembering my own philological conversations with Keith – surely proof that this Festschrift has amply achieved its purpose.

This reviewer is daunted by the task of commenting in any detail on such an array of scholarship and erudition. Quite unfairly, therefore, I single out four of the contributions for comment. Alan Morris's piece about wordplay in French polars is remarkable in that it frequently seems to mimic Keith himself: Morris comments that Keith mastered witticism and jeux de mots ‘in which areas it could be said that his eminence grise’; he embarks on a tongue-in-cheek attempt to devise a theoretical framework for the exuberant wordplay of the French polar and its wealth of double-sided intertextuality, rounding off his hilarious romp through pun and allusion with the title of a polar: ‘Crève de plaisanterie!’ This paper must have brought the house down!

Cédric Moreau's Nutmeg and Panenka invites special mention since in two respects it owes much to Keith: as Moreau's supervisor (for an MPhil on the vocabulary of mountaineering and rock-climbing), Keith instilled in him his love of words; and the paper is based on a mass of football-related material collected by Keith and bequeathed to Moreau in the form of scores of files containing 1,611 entries in French and 1,919 in English, mostly culled from L’Équipe and France Football. Moreau usefully arranges the entries according to the types of ‘metasemous processes’ enumerated by Tournier Reference Tournier1985 – and by the way nutmeg is rhyming slang for leg, and Panenka is a Czech footballer!

On the other hand, Mar Parra-Olmedo's piece (not delivered at the conference) is slightly disappointing, and bears the marks of rapid execution: there are cases of repetition which more careful revision would have eliminated, a rather limp conclusion (p.135): ‘if the satirical uptake fails, and the humorous content of satire is not conveyed, the translator will have failed to achieve this main purpose of the satirical text’. In other words, if they don't laugh, the translation's no good – a somewhat banal conclusion in contrast to such high-sounding statements as ‘My analysis demonstrates the referential nature of satire and the importance of its perlocutionary force in effecting criticism through humour’.

By contrast, the renowned Villon expert Mike Freeman (who alas died in April 2009), describes Keith as ‘an enthusiastic and learned scholar, and a delightfully warm-hearted man’ (p.137), and presents an erudite and amusing article, which made me imagine the two of them holding a conversation over a pint of real ale in a pub garden (surrounded by fauna-filled woods) discussing Keith's Bestiary, with Mike saying ‘and had you thought of this one Keith? Another pint?’

I first met Keith at a workshop organised in St Etienne by the French cultural attaché in the late 1970s, when French authorities were railing against the invasion of Anglicisms, and Étiemble's Parlez-vous franglais? was obligatory reading. A propos of some proscribed borrowing we came across, I quipped (feebly, I thought) ‘Ô Etiemble, ô mores!’ – and immediately became aware of Keith's passion for word-play; his eyes lit up behind his thick glasses (not at that stage repaired with the mending tape evoked by Joseph Farrell on p.2!), he became highly animated, and continued to invent variants on the theme for some time – an early manifestation of the pulsion ludique mentioned by his student Céderic Moreau (p.38). It then emerged that we shared a taste for San-Antonio and Cumbrian pubs and for mountain walking and the flora to be found along the way – and our conversations continued during many hilarious evenings in a number of bouis-bouis stéphanois.

This companionable, unconventional academic wore his erudition lightly. The grinning photograph and the title ‘Words & Things’ are an excellent choice for the cover of this enjoyable Gedenkshcrift, and its content is accompanied by an outpouring of warmth and affection for the remarkable man whose life and work it admirably commemorates.