THE BOOK LIST

A. The Hutchinson Dictionary of Difficult Words.
Ayto, John: 0091770793

B. The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English.
Barrett, Grant: 0071458042

C. The Meaning of Tingo: And Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World. Boinod, Adam Jacot de: 1594200866

D. The Superior Person's Book of Words
Bowler, Peter: 087923556X

E. From Achilles' Heel to Zeus' Shield
Dibbley, Dale Corey: 044990735X

F. Dolan:Dictionary of Hiberno-English
Dolan, T.P.: 0717140393

G. What in the Word? Wordplay, Word Lore, and Answers to Your Peskiest Questions about Language.
Elster, Charles Harrington: 0156031973

H. There's a Word for It: A Grandiloquent Guide to Life.
Elster, Charles Harrington: 1416510869

I. A New Dictionary of Eponyms.
Freeman, Morton S.: 0195093542

J. A Treasury for Word Lovers.
Freeman, Morton S.: 0894950274

K. Horsefeathers: & Other Curious Words.
Funk, Charles Earle: 0060513373

L. Oxymoronica: Paradoxical Wit & Wisdom From History's Greatest Wordsmiths. Grothe, Mardy: 0060536993

M. New Words. Hargraves, Orin: 0195172825

N. Hatch's Order of Magnitude: Methodical Rankings of the Commonplace & the Incredible for Daily Reference by a Man of Extraordinary Genius & Impeccable Taste. Hatch, Michael: 1582974950

O. Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure, and Preposterous Words: Gathered from Numerous and Diverse Authoritative Sources.
Heifetz, Josefa: 0806504986

P. Forgotten English. Kacirk, Jeffrey: 0688166369

Q. The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten.
Kacirk, Jeffrey: 0684857618

R. Word Nerd: More Than 18,000 Fascinating Facts About Words.
Kipfer, Barbara Ann: 1402208510

S. Word Spy: The Word Lover's Guide to Modern Culture.
McFedries, Paul: 076791466X

T. Merriam-Webster's Pocket Rhyming Dictionary: 0877795169

U. Predicting New Words: The Secrets of Their Success.
Metcalf, Allan: 061813008X

V. The Dictionary of Wordplay. Morice, Dave: 0915924978

W. Cupboard Love, 2nd Ed.: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities
Morton, Mark: 1894663667

X. Depraved and Insulting English. Novobatzky, Peter: 0156011492

Y. DEWDROPPERS, WALDOS, AND SLACKERS. Ostler, Rosemarie: 0965809641

Z. Mo' Urban Dictionary: Ridonkulous Street Slang Defined.
LLC Andrews McMeel: 0740768751

AA. Gallimaufry: A Hodge-Podge of Words Vanishing from Our Vocabulary
Quinion, Michael: 0198610629

BB. When Is a Pig a Hog?: A Guide to Confoundingly Related English Words. Randall, Bernice: 013955212X

CC. They Have A Word For It. Rheingold, Howard: 0874774640

DD. 2000 Most Challenging and Obscure Words. Schur, Norman W.: 0883658488

EE. More Weird and Wonderful Words. Shanahan, Danny: 0195170571

FF. Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages.
Shea, Ammon: 0399533982

GG. Bibliophile's Dictionary: 2000 Masterful Words and Phrases.
Westley, Miles: 1582973563

HH. Speaking of Animals : A Dictionary of Animal Metphors.
Robert A. Palmatier.

Tune in later for the full skinny. Right now it's time to get something to eat.

The ones I like most are words which are common in some other language, but for some reason express concepts that can't easily be expressed in English. A well-known example, which has now become an accepted loan-word, is the German schadenfreude. Some others that I at least think deserve to become loan-words:

lagom. Swedish: just the right amount, neither too much nor too little.

otsukaresama. Japanese: you are tired, and I greatly respect you for that. Encouraging phrase commonly used when someone has been working their ass off, and you want to show appreciation while making it clear that they have superior status.

cinq à sept. French: affair carried out mainly between 5 pm and 7 pm, i.e. between the earliest time when one can plausibly leave work, and the latest time when one can plausibly claim to have done so.

I am using the following word panel to help assess breadth of coverage:

aberdevine
assapan
baculum
banzai
culacino
cliometrics
feague
gound
gillygaloo
holmgang
lant
quakebuttock
oblomovism
tantony
wayzgoose
password fatigue
vespetro
moazogotl
thank-you-ma'am

A. The Hutchinson Dictionary of Difficult Words.
Ayto, John: 0091770793

I have a 1996 edition of this, published as the QPB (Quality Paperback Bookclub) Dictionary of Difficult Words. It is available online at this site -

http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/di...

breadth of coverage: 4
ease of use: 4
scholarship: 4
charm: 3
total = 15

Comments: Good succinct definitions; sometimes too succinct. For instance, we are told that 'banzai' is a Japanese warcry, but not that it means 'may you live 10,000 years' (from ban "ten thousand" + sai "year.") A definition of 'baculus' as a rod or staff is included, but we are not told that 'baculum' means 'penis bone'. Pronunciation guide requires knowledge of the IPA, which is included at the beginning of the book, but not on each page, as is done in some dictionaries. A strong point is the inclusion of several essays on specific topics such as words which are commonly confused, the top 100 misspelled words, differences between British and U.S. spelling and pronunciation, basics of punctuation and grammar, and common usage questions. In general, these essays appear sensible and likely to be genuinely helpful.

A solid four stars.

Quakebuttock???

???

M. Giltinan: pls explain...

also, gillygaloo while you're at it--

The gillygaloo is a bird of colorful plumage and fine melodious song, native to the remote forests of Wisconsin, that is unusually well-adapted to nesting on the steepest of slopes. The gillygaloo lays square eggs so that they won't roll downhill.

Accordingly, these eggs are a valuable commodity for the lumberjacks. When hardboiled, they make excellent dice.

A quakebuttock is a coward. I'm surprised you haven't come across my groundbreaking series of children's books featuring "Quentin the quakebuttocked quail".

Ah...I see.

No, I haven't yet come across your (in)famous children's series, but it's on my to-read list now!

B. The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English.
Barrett, Grant: 0071458042

I wanted to like this book much more than I actually did. Grant Barrett is a highly-respected lexicographer who maintains the excellent website, the double-tongued dictionary. From his bio on that site:

"Grant Barrett, creator and editor of the Double-Tongued Dictionary, is an American lexicographer and editor of The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English (May 2006, McGraw-Hill). He is also co-host of the language-related public radio show A Way With Words, broadcast nationwide via radio, streaming, and podcast. He also serves as vice president for communications and technology for the American Dialect Society, an academic organization that has been devoted to the study of English in North America since 1889. He currently does freelance lexicography for Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and for the Collins-brand dictionaries published by Cengage, formerly Thomson Heinle. In the past, he served as project editor of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang and edited the Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang (2004). On occasion, he contributes to the journal American Speech and writes for newspapers such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Malaysian Star. He also has a personal weblog called The Lexicographer's Rules."

Content in "The Official Dictionary ..." has been culled from the double-tongued dictionary website, whose focus Barrett describes as follows:

"The Double-Tongued Dictionary records undocumented or under-documented words from the fringes of English, with a focus on slang, jargon, and new words. This site strives to record terms and expressions that are absent from, or are poorly covered in, mainstream dictionaries."

Here are my ratings:

Coverage: 2
Usability: 4
Scholarship: 4
Charm: 2
Total: 12/20, for an overall 3-star rating. BUT SEE BELOW.

Comments: My relatively low scores for coverage and charm need some explication. Paradoxically, the low score for "coverage" is actually a reflection, in this case, of the enormously broad scope of the dictionary. Candidate entries for the website, and for this book, were obtained by automated google-searching across the internet; the subsequent editing and filtering to decide what should be included in the dictionary presumably reflect Mr Barrett's judgement and personal preferences. I can hardly fault him for exercising editorial judgement, except that the result is, somehow, frustratingly unsatisfying. The net he casts is so wide, and the resulting selection so idiosyncratic, that the final result conveys a certain eccentricity, but not that much charm (despite Barrett's obvious enthusiasm and scholarship). I was left befuddled as to what the particular selection of entries in this dictionary is supposed to represent. Are they words that Barrett believes
*are not yet in standard dictionaries, but ought to be?
*are not yet in standard dictionaries, but are likely to be in future?
*deserve broader attention (if so, why)?
*merit inclusion, just because he found them neat?

It's just not clear. Many of the entries don't strike me as meeting the first two criteria at all, and a word's 'charm' is, of course, in the eye of the beholder. But consider these entries;

"marbit", a marshmallow bit found in processed breakfast cereal;
"godunk", a person who solicits free airplane trips (the only two citations date from 1939 and 1946); "gap out", a variant of "space out";
"FLOHPA", an acronym used to denote the swing states of Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania during the 2004 election (all five citations date from 2004);
"dub-dub", a restaurant server (possibly specific to the TGI Friday's restaurant chain)
"ding-ding", Hong Kong term for a streetcar
"Califunny", a jocular or derisive name for California
"land of fruit and nuts", jocular or derogatory name for California
"lolicom", a Lolita complex, the attraction of older men to young girls
"rinse", new Zealand prison slang for GHB
"Rummy's dummies", derisive term for the U.S. military,
"unass", to dismount or disembark
"wet", prison slang for a recreational drug made from marijuana, PCP, and formaldehyde
"in the weeds", restaurant slang for the condition of a waiter who is completely swamped
"yumptious", delicious - a portmanteau of 'yummy' and 'scrumptious'
"vuzvuz", derogatory term applied by Sephardic jews to Ashkenazic jews.

Do I need to explain why I find none of them even remotely interesting or clever? How about:

weirdly uninteresting specificity, only of interest to a subset of waiters and felons;
built-in obsolescence, sell-by date already in the past (FLOHPA, Rummy's dummies);
terminal stupidity (Califunnia? CALIFUNNIA?);
needed to be executed at birth (yumptious, unass);
any combination of the above reasons.

I hate to say it, but there is no obvious reason for this particular book to exist. I am forced to override my own brilliantly evenhanded scoring system and downgrade my rating to two stars. And that's being generous.

This is not a yumptious book.

C. The Meaning of Tingo: And Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World. Boinod, Adam Jacot de: 1594200866

Oh dear. Another problematic entry in the dictionary sweepstakes. Based on this book (there's a followup volume, "Toujours Tingo", which I haven't read), and the author's own website:

http://themeaningoftingo.blogspot.com/

one is forced to the inexorable conclusion that Monsieur J de B is

* extraordinarily gullible
* incredibly lazy
* a cynic who is onto a good thing and not above milking it for all it's worth
* some disturbingly human combination of the above three.

Personally, I opt for the fourth choice.

"The Meaning of Tingo" purports to be a collection of words in various languages which are essentially untranslatable. As such, they offer a unique view into the way different peoples and cultures look at the world, new insights into "the human condition" and blahdeblahdeblah ...

People love this kind of shit. They lap it up. Witness Manny's comment above. I'll be the first to admit - I'm a bit of a sucker for it myself. One of the appeals of learning a foreign language is that it does force you to look at the world a bit differently. And, on the surface, it would appear that "The meaning of Tingo" delivers up a rich feast. I mean, who could resist:

razbliuto: 'the sentimental feeling you have about someone you once loved but no longer do' (Russian)
Scheissenbedauern: ‘the disappointment one feels when something turns out not nearly as badly as one had expected’ (German)
seigneur-terrasse: Someone who spends time, but not money, at a café. (French; literally, 'lord of the terrace')
agobilles: a burglar's tools. (German)

The problem is, none of the words above actually exists. Something Monsieur J de B could have presumably found out if he had cracked a dictionary, or consulted even one native French, Russian, or German speaker. That German speaker, or indeed any student of German, could have told him that a 'word' such as 'Scheissenbedauern' could not exist, as it violates the basic rules for constructing compound words in the language. But, no, it appears that whatever minimal research he did was conducted exclusively online. Now there's a recipe for accuracy and attention to detail.

How about:

sucrer les fraises: to die (literally, "to sugar the strawberries"
aardappel: Dutch for "potato" (literally, 'hard apple')
koshatnik: a dealer in stolen cats.

Nope. Nope. And nope again.
"Sucrer les fraises" does exist in French, but it is used to describe a Parkinson-like tremor, not the act of dying. 'Aardappel' means 'earth-apple'. 'Koshatnik', if it means anything at all, might be used to describe a 'cat-lover' or 'cat person', but 'dealer in stolen cats' suggests that someone's leg is being pulled.

And that's the fundamental problem with this superficially appealing book. One Amazon reviewer, a native Russian speaker, identifies 80% of the Russian 'words' as being unrecognizable, garbled, or non-existent. There are similar objections from native Chinese, French, German, and Turkish speakers.

Which leads to my scoring:
Breadth of coverage: 2
Research: 0
Usability: 2
Charm: 0 (because it's not charming to lead your readership down the garden path with ignorance masquerading as fact, no matter how idiosyncratically entertaining)

This book is moderately entertaining rubbish.
Two stars.

You know, because items B and C on the list were such a buzzkill, I'm going to cheat and skip on down to Mrs Byrne's contribution, which is what this thread is ostensibly about, anyway.

here's my evaluation:

Breadth of coverage: 5
Scholarship: 4
Usability: 4
Charm: 6 (so I'm cheating, sue me!)

Total: 19/20.

Josefa's book approaches perfection. I am in awe. Five coruscating stars.

D. The Superior Person's Book of Words
Bowler, Peter: 087923556X

At first glance, Peter Bowler appears to represent the position I mocked in an earlier post, that command of a larger vocabulary is a means to social advancement, and can be acquired by reading a book full of fancy words. Fortunately, closer reading of his introduction to this short, amusing, book reveals a refreshing tongue-in-cheek attitude. I can imagine that the author's smart aleckness could lose its appeal over the long haul, but it works quite well in a book of this size (500 words defined; 178 pages). Mr Bowler is a self-professed logophile:

".. if words are weapons, they are also toys. They are fun to play with... "

who doesn't take himself too seriously:

"Pronunciations are not given ... The reader who genuinely wishes to equip himself with the vocabulary of a Superior Person should be prepared to submit to the intellectual discipline of finding out the pronunciations for himself."

Two sample entries should be enough to convey the flavor of the book:

abecedarian insult "Sir, you are an apogenous, bovaristic, coprolalial, dasypygal, excerebrose, facinorous, gnathonic, hircine, ithyphallic, jumentous, kyphotic, labrose, mephitic, napiform, oligophrenial, papuliferous, quisquilian, rebarbative, saponaceous, thersitical, unguinous, ventripotent, wlatsome, xylocephalous, yirning, zoophyte". Translation: "Sir, you are an impotent, conceited, obscene, hairy-buttocked, brainless, wicked, toadying, goatish, indecent, stable-smelling, hunchbacked, thick-lipped, stinking, turnip-shaped, feeble-minded, pimply, trashy, repellent, smarmy, foul-mouthed, greasy, gluttonous, loathsome, wooden-headed, whining, extremely low form of animal life."

gralloch (verb): To disembowel a deer. From the Gaelic word for intestines. The existence of the term implies the prevalence of the act, which the author assumes to be one of the pastimes of the English upper classes, along with fox-chasing, train-spotting, and bird-murdering.

Breadth of coverage: 3 out of 5 (only 500 words)
Scholarship: 4 out of 5 (Bowler adopts a breezily authoritative tone, without necessarily providing all the details, but there are no obvious signs that he doesn't know his stuff)
Usability: 3.5 out of 5. No guide to pronunciation, but points for including often-hilarious suggestions for use in a sentence, e.g., under 'limaceous' (sluglike) "Keep your hands to yourself, you limaceous endomorph!"
Charm: 3.5 out of 5

Total: 14 out of 20.
A solid 3.5-star effort.

I. A New Dictionary of Eponyms.
Freeman, Morton S.: 0195093542

As I read through this perfectly innocuous book by Morton Freeman, I found it hard to believe that it was written as recently as 1997. One might be forgiven for thinking the publication date was a century earlier. This impression is a consequence of Mr Freeman's particular selection of entries and is bolstered by a certain claustrophobic quality in his prose, that evokes the mustiness of an Edwardian gentleman-scholar's library.

Second-guessing an author's selection criteria is, of course, a little unfair, but what's a reviewer to do? For a book like this, where the huge number of potential candidates for inclusion forces the author to make tough choices, the selection criteria are crucial. It's the particular words the author chooses to discuss, far more than what he says about them (assuming he's not a complete idiot), that make or break the book. So, as a reviewer, one can't stop the involuntary eyeball-rolling reaction ("I can't believe he wasted a page and a half on X...., but Y doesn't even get a mention). One tends to focus on that maddening (perceived) room for improvement.

Don't get me wrong. Authorial idiosyncrasy in the inclusion criteria is not only inevitable - it's good. We want to see the author's quirky enthusiasms. Except... that we do kind of hope they will overlap to some reasonable extent with our own... cuz otherwise, the ride could get pretty boring.

So, with the understanding that there is no "right" selection, here are a few places where my choices would have differed from Mr Freeman's (I've paraphrased some of the definitions below, for brevity)

Boulangism "a wave of hysterical anti-German sentiment that engulfed France from 1886-1889, provoked by General Georges Ernest Jean Marie Boulanger" .... OK, fine, but this is supposed to be a book about eponyms, not a historical encyclopedia.

Coueism? Coxey's Army? Fourdrinier? Bertillonage? Huh? Was this just random arcana you felt you had to get out of your system, or were you trying to establish your erudition cred? Maybe a little passive-aggressive reader alienation?

Brill Abraham Arden Brill (1874-1948), born in Austria, immigrated to America at an early age, introduced Freudian psychoanalysis to the American medical profession .... yeah, yeah - fun stuff - but did he actually, yanno, introduce his name as a word to the English language. Because, in my dictionaries, "brill" is just a kind of fish, esteemed in England.

And while we're on the topic, why the compulsion to include all these mini-biographical sketches of 19th century scientists? Not to disrespect Ampere, Ohm, Coulomb, Einstein, Faraday, Henry, Malpighi, Mendeleyev, Newton, or Watt, but how big a deal was it back in those days to get a scientific unit named after you? Note that I'm not objecting to Bunsen, Geiger, Edison, Fermi, Gauss, Celsius, Fahrenheit, Bessemer process, Archimedes' principle, Davy lamp, Marconigram, Salk vaccine, Sabin vaccine, Vernier scale, Volta or Maxwell. Though I actually don't think having a law or a piece of lab equipment named for you automatically makes you interesting. Freeman seemed pretty hellbent on getting his 250-word thumbnail biosketch of James Clerk Maxwell in somewhere: personally, I think "Maxwell's demon" would have been a more interesting hook than maxwell, the unit of magnetic flux.

Let's think about this whole unit thing, anyway. Freeman includes the ampere, the coulomb, the ohm, the watt, the farad, the volt, the henry, the newton, degrees Celsius and Fahrenheit, the fermi. (Really it's just an excuse for him to engage in his favorite sport of microhagiography) But why stop there? What about the tesla, the svedberg, the siemens, the sabin, the lambert, the darcy, the sievert, the oerstedt, the pascal, etc. etc. etc? Why not include them all? Well, obviously, to do so would be incredibly tedious and boring. So why did Freeman think amperes and coulombs and henrys and farads were interesting enough to warrant inclusion? What was he thinking?

The sad thing here is that there is actually some fun to be extracted from eponymous units of measurement: one could actually be mildly entertaining, with just a little effort. If I had space to include my dirty dozen favorite eponymous measurement units, I'd steer well clear of electromagnetism. How about instead -

the Apgar score,
the Balthazar,
the Scoville unit,
the Smoot,
the stimp,
the degree MacMichael,
the warhol,
the millihelen,
the centimorgan,
the mickey,
the billigram,
the garn,
the megafonzie

measures, respectively, of neonate status, champagne bottle volume, hotness of chili peppers, distance, the speed of the green on a golf course, viscosity of chocolate, duration of fame, beauty, genetic distance, detectable movement of a computer mouse, the weight an evangelist carries with God, severity of space sickness, and coolness.

I have to finish this and go to bed. So what's my point? Eponyms are truly fertile ground. There is much fun to be had, so it should be possible to write an engaging, interesting, funny book on the topic.

This "New Dictionary of Eponyms" is not that book.

Two stars. Freeman doesn't really care about the words; he's really some kind of frustrated biographer of assorted 19th century public figures.

Here are some eponyms more likely to amuse or entertain you:

bishop, burke, dolly varden, cummingtonite, phryne, shepardize, namby-pamby, oblomovism, tantony pig, syringe, thersitical, St Anthony's fire, yentl's syndrome, Charles's wain, saber's beads, Pele's hair, Mother Carey's chickens.

But you will have to look them up for yourself.

So. This whole endeavor is taking way longer than I had anticipated, because of my constitutional inability to write a succinct review of anything. Books about words, in particular, cater to this weakness, because I rarely find myself indifferent. Please bear with me.

Before moving on to the next review, I thought it only fair to share with you a sampling of entries from Mrs Byrne's dictionary, to try to convey its unique character - the charm that propels it to the top of my list. If you can get your hands on a copy of this marvelous book, grab it, and don't let any of your friends borrow it.

avering: a boy's begging in the nude to arouse sympathy
bamblustercate: to embarrass or confuse
bludget: a female thief who decoys her victims into alleys
calf-slobber: meringue on a pie (slang)
doodle-dasher: a male masturbator
dulosis: enslavement as practiced by some ants who bag enemy young and raise them
epicaricacy: taking pleasure in others' misfortune (one to have in reserve next time someone casually drops the 'schadenfreude' word)
flapdragon: a game of catching candy from burning brandy
fumet: 1. a flavoring agent for sauces 2. deer shit
gander-mooner: a new father who is permitted to disregard his marriage vows for one month
squonk: a mythical bird covered in warts and continually weeping in self-pity (slang)
rumgumption: shrewdness
ratamacue: a drum figure more difficult than the paradiddle
qualtagh: the first person seen after leaving the house (Isle of Man)
owling: the act of smuggling sheep or wool
parnel: a priest's mistress, a loose woman
nixie: a letter so badly addressed it can't be delivered (slang)
scaphism: an old Persian method of executing criminals by covering them in honey and letting the sun and the insects finish the job.

Didn't T.S. Eliot finish off one of the characters in "The Cocktail Party" in some similar fashion? (One of the female characters, I feel sure)

David wrote: "Didn't T.S. Eliot finish off one of the characters in "The Cocktail Party" in some similar fashion? (One of the female characters, I feel sure)"

Celia, right. Nasty way to die...

E. From Achilles' Heel to Zeus' Shield
Dibbley, Dale Corey: 044990735X

Coverage: 4.5 out of 5
Scholarship: 4.5 out of 5
User-friendliness: 4 out of 5
Charm: 4 out of 5

This unassuming book, an exploration of the way in which the gods and heroes of myth and legend live on in our everyday language, is a real treasure. Though it's relatively short (220 pages, ~300 root words and phrases), the author manages to pack in a lot of information, in an engagingly natural style that is completely free of academic pomposity. Features of the book that I found particularly appealing were:

* separate sections on the etymology of:
- days of the week
- months of the year named for legendary figures
- chemical elements with mythological names
- animals and plants with mythological names
- planets and their moons
- constellations (comprehensive and informative)
* the author's willingness to go beyond just Greek and Roman legends and to include discussion of myths from other cultures as well. Egyptian, Norse, Celtic, Germanic, Arabian, and Sumerian mythology are all well-represented, even though Greek mythology - probably unavoidably - is most prominent.
* the author has a kind of discursive style that some readers might find irritating, but which I actually enjoyed, if only because it leads her to include interesting nuggets of information in unexpected places, so that one stumbles across these little Easter eggs throughout the book. For example, an entry on (being struck by) "Cupid's arrow" provides not only the legend underlying the origin of the phrase, but also discussion of the phrase "Cupid's-bow mouth", Kewpie dolls, Rose O' Neill's Cupid drawings, and the etymology of the word "cupidity".

One minor quibble: although entries are ordered alphabetically, and there is a fair amount of cross-referencing, an index would have been a welcome addition.

Random stuff I learned from reading this book:
*that the male equivalents of caryatids are called "atlantes"
*the name of the drug "atropine" is derived from Atropos (she who cannot be turned), third of the three Furies, and the one who cuts the thread of life and brings death
*"seventh heaven" is derived from the Koran
*the drug prescription symbol ℞ is derived from the astronomical symbol for Jupiter, ♃

This is a fine book: 4.5 stars overall.

As I have chosen this comment thread to serve as repository for all my thoughts about the various books I own that can be thought of as "vocabulary sources" (though I am also pasting a copy of each review at the relevant book listing, in traditional goodreads style), let me digress from reviewing the various printed books to recommend a few online resources.

By far the best place to start is the OneLook dictionary site:
http://www.onelook.com/
Their current claim is "12,960,939 words in 973 dictionaries indexed"; I can't vouch for this claim's accuracy, but they do provide access to an enormous number of dictionaries assembled in one site. Their wildcard and reverse dictionary options are also extremely useful.

If, like me, you don't have the good luck to work at an institution which gives you access to the OED online, there is still the very comprehensive Century Dictionary, online and free:

http://www.global-language.com/CENTURY/

Finally, though both are included in OneLook searches, I would like to acknowledge two of my all-time favorite online repositories of obscure and charming words:

http://phrontistery.info/index.html
http://www.kokogiak.com/logolepsy/

Each of these two sites also has links to other word sites on the web.

Explore and enjoy!

K. Horsefeathers: & Other Curious Words.
Funk, Charles Earle: 0060513373

This book was a family project - begun by Charles Earle Funk, Litt D., finished by his son CEF Jr., with (pretty dreadful) illustrations by Tom Funk. Insert obvious joke (it's funkadelic!) here. I guess these are the Funk & Wagnalls people. The book's main focus is explaining the origin of the words listed as primary entries. Authorial whim seems to have been the main selection criterion. Words are listed in apparently random order; there is an alphabetized index, but cross-referencing is inadequate (for instance, "stirrup cup", the very first entry, fails to link to its synonym "doch-an-doris").

It was first published in 1958 and shows its age.

My scores:

Coverage: 1 out of 5
Scholarship: 4.5 out of 5
User-friendliness: 2 out of 5
Charm: 0 out of 5

Why didn't I like this book? Primarily because the vast majority of the 600 or so words chosen for inclusion struck me as being remarkably uninteresting.

Ferris wheel. Cheesecake. Beachcomber. Loophole. Sherry. Thoroughfare. Unkempt. Bandy-legged. Cockroach. Dragonfly. Cobweb. Tintinnabulation. Fifty-fifty. Daredevil. Sang-froid. Dandelion. Vinegar. Amateur. Fahrenheit. Airedale. Streetwalker.

These are words with blindingly obvious etymologies, and even Charles Earle Funke cannot make them interesting.

Many of the chosen words are distinctly dated:
Crosspatch. Flapdoodle. Runabout. Chucklehead. Chopfallen. Xerography. Banana oil. Talbotype. Green Soap. Gagman. Hackamore. Sitz bath. Poppycock. Cousin-german. Velocipede.

"Xerography", you ask? "It is made up of the combining forms of xeros, "dry", and graphein, "to write", hence has the literal meaning of "dry writing". It is used exclusively in connection with a photographic process in which the latent image is formed as an electrostatic charge and is developed through the adhesion of a dry powder to the charged .... Oops! Sorry. Just nodded off there for a while.

Stopgap: One of the many meanings of to stop is "to dam, to plug up", as in "to stop a leak" or "to stop a drain". A stopgap, even in its modern sense of some temporary measure to fill a need, is, both literally and figuratively, something to "stop" a "gap".

In other startling news, under "streetwalker", we read that "it seems probable that the term was coined as being descriptive of the practice of prostitutes pursuing their trade openly on the streets".

Gosh, ya think so, Charlie?

Ten pages of this kind of shlock from Doctor Obvious will have you clawing your eyes out, looking for an exit.

One Star.

H. There's a Word for It: A Grandiloquent Guide to Life.
Elster, Charles Harrington: 1416510869

Right in the opening sentence, Charles Harrington Elster lets us know that we are in entertaining company: "... what you're about to read (if you dare) is a work of the utmost intellectual incontinence written by a man who is plumb crazy, stark raving mad, and out of his grandiloquent gourd about words".

Let me get this out of the way at the start. I am a fan of CHE. The man's got style. He's got a sense of humor. His enthusiasm is infectious. And he understands perfectly the kinds of words which readers get a kick out of. This reader, anyway.

Coverage: 5 out of 5
Scholarship: 4 out of 5
user-friendliness: 4 out of 5
Charm: 5 out of 5

This is not a dictionary. Elster eschews the standard alphabetical listing, choosing instead to group entries by theme. He considers twelve main categories:
1. Health and Disease.
2. Food and Drink.
3. Love, Sex and Perversion.
4. Argument and Insults.
5. Words to describe People.
6. Phobias.
7. Religion, Belief and Divination.
8. Politics and Business.
9. Knowledge and Communication.
10. Sound and Fury: Human/Animal Noise and Behavior.
11. Uncommon Words for Everyday Things.
12. Epilogue: Some Words that make Life Living.

Chapters have further useful subdivisions. For example, the reader may choose an insult from such categories as: slobs and fops, gluttons, slackers, idiots, thieves and spongers, crummy kids, animal insults, dwelling places and eating habits, and miscellaneous unclassifiable nastiness.

The delight you derive from this book will be directly proportional to your degree of word-geekishness. Most of the words in this book are not strictly necessary . (300 different phobias, 100 ways of predicting the future, all those very specific words for collectors of various stripes?) But their existence surely makes the world a little bit more interesting.

QUIZ:

1. A collector of postcards is a ?
2. Fear of crossing bridges is ?
3. Someone who sprays saliva when speaking is ?
4. The study of miracles is known as ?
5. The summer version of hibernation is?
6. The fur-covered pouch attached to a kilt is a ?
7. The groove in the middle of your upper lip is ?
8. Food that you spit out, e.g. seeds or pips, is ?
9. Sublimation of sexual desire through cooking is ?
10. What word describes a pubic wig?
11. A word meaning 'like, or related to, an ostrich?
12. A person who habitually drops in uninvited at mealtimes is known as a ?

4.5 stars, rounded up to 5.
Quiz answers in a subsequent post - feel free to write in your suggestions.

Speaking of Animals : A Dictionary of Animal Metphors.
Robert A. Palmatier.

I have mixed feelings about this book. On the plus side, it definitely fills a niche. It's well-organized and easy to use. But coverage seems idiosyncratic - sometimes seeming oddly all-embracing (you get the impression that some words are in there just because they may, at one time, have shared a dictionary with an animal), but with definite gaps, and already appearing distinctly dated (it was published in 1995). Specific examples are given below, but first my scoring in various categories.

Coverage: 3 out of 5
Scholarship: 4.5 out of 5.
User-friendliness: 4.5 out of 5
Charm: 2 out of 5

Total: 14 out of 20, or 3.5 stars.

To give credit where it is due, the dictionary is extremely well-organized. The primary alphabetical listing of entries is augmented by a second index, wherein all entries are re-listed by animal (alphabetically by animal). This second index, which runs to 40 pages, also includes sections for "bird (general)", "fish (general)", and "insect (general", and is one of the most attractive features of the book. For instance, it allows one to get an immediate answer to the question: "what animal is the basis for the most metaphors?" (horse, with dog as a close second). Cross-referencing is extensive and helpful.

Scholarship appears excellent - the list of primary references is comprehensive, but not excessive, and Professor Palmatier is an authoritative guide, albeit a somewhat matter-of-fact one. Reaction to the style in which the explanations are couched is, of course, subjective, but I found the dryness of his style - I can't avoid the word - just plain dull. I have no doubt that Professor Palmatier is a language enthusiast (I mean, let's face it, only someone who's a little crazy about language would even contemplate an undertaking like this dictionary), but somehow his enthusiasm doesn't really shine through in most of the entries.

This lack of charisma is the main reason for my low rating on the 'charm' scale. Also, despite apparently broad inclusion criteria ('erode' and 'erase' are included, linked to the rat only on the basis of a shared etymological root, 'rodere', the verb "to dig"; CAT scan and catsup are included, despite having nothing to do with cats, or any other animal), there are some glaring omissions. Some of these reflect evolution of the language since 1995, but not all can be explained in this way. Below is a partial list of terms you won't find in the dictionary; I'm sure there are others.

Some may reasonably be believed to have entered the language after publication of this dictionary:
jump the shark, prairie-dogging, skunkworks, mouse potato, yak-shaving, seagull manager, salmon day, donkey sentence, feathered fish, stress puppy, idea hamster, ant farm, goat-roping exercise, mole-groomer, sleep camel ,
and may be judged not yet to have passed the test of time.
Other omissions seem less defensible:
doe-eyed, deer-in-the-headlights look, like herding cats, four horsemen of the apocalypse, pale horse, singerie, frogmarch, elephant’s graveyard, culture vulture, zebra crossing, Schrodinger’s cat, brass monkey weather, dead cat bounce, dogsbody, monkeys’ (or foxes’) wedding, poodle-faker .
I give Professor Palmatier the benefit of the doubt on sweater puppies. Pussies and beavers are given their due in the dictionary, though don’t look for the more vulgar, feline, version of henpecked. Credit to Prof P. for overcoming his midwestern reticence to include the term “beaver shot”, an instance where his somewhat desiccated style serves him well:

shoot a beaver: to sneak a look at, or photograph, the adult female pudenda, or vulva. The American beaver has long been prized for its thick brown fur, which is used to make capes, coats, and hats, although the semiaquatic animal is usually trapped rather than shot. A beaver shot is a filmed or taped picture of the female genitals.

(That little aside, "is usually trapped rather than shot", is hilarious).

I didn’t intend for this review to end on a vulgar note; it just seems to have worked out that way.

3.5 stars. Round as you see fit.