David Grambs
The Endangered English DictionaryBodacious Words Your Dictionary Forgot"Like animals, plants and book reviewers, words can become extinct, but Grambs is here to salvage the most missed of the lexical dinosaurs."Patricia Holt, San Francisco ChronicleWe often hear about the richness of the English language, how many more words it contains than French or German. And yet modern desk dictionaries are the result of a paring away of that glory, so that merely standard, functional, current words remain. The price we pay for such convenience is the thousands of delightful words we never see or hear. This book is an effort to save some of those wordsapplicable to everyday life and countless word gamesfrom extinction. The resultant treasure trove of exotic verbal creatures is an indispensable resource for every lover of language. "The next time you see some guy stagger out of a bar ready to take on the world, 'drunk and feeling brave,' you can dismiss him with a single word: potvaliant! That short, fat person nearby on the subway is fubsy, and his thickset companion is spuddy. The loudmouth a few seats away is bloviating, his babblative chatter little more than clatterfart. This can be addictive. . . ."—Jonathan Yardley
"Now that Grambs has introduced me
to it, I plan to make good use of 'bloviation,' meaning talking windily, as in
political candidates or sports commentators." A selection:
David Grambs has written five other books on the English language. He lives in New York City. 1997 / paperback / ISBN 0-393-31606-8 / 288 pages / reference/dictionary | |||||
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