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The Wordsworth Dictionary of Foreign Words in English
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 11, 2009
ON WRITING REVIEWS - A FEW GENERAL REMARKS
Whilst it’s very true that this lovely website Goodreads can soothe your cacoethes scribendi nonetheless it can also be injurious to your amour propre. How galling it must be to toil over a time-consuming uberreview and get no comments and no votes from your 143 cold & unfeeling soi-disant friends! (This has happened to me on occasion.) So how should you avoid this sad fate? It’s well to remember that the GR audience is au courant to an unnerving degree – they have read everything, they have strong opinions on every conceivable topic, no mere flaneurs and boulevardiers are they, so your reviews should offer apercus right and left, be brimful of bel esprit with beaucoups of bonbons and bon mots and buckets of bonhomie - you can ask who put the dung in the bildungsroman , you can conduct your own gleeful auto-da-fe for your favourite bete-noir, be outre, be risque, administer the coup de grace to that formerly enfant not so terrible any more (Martin Amis, for instance), you can loft a few ballons d’essai , you can take a glorious stand contra mundum and say loudly and proudly that Twilight is a great work of modern literature, they’ll enjoy that. It’s almost de rigeur to epater those wretched bourgeois all over their weltanschauung. But don’t make ad hominem remarks along the lines of “you Proust-munching gayboy” unless you know the reviewer personally (like, very personally). That would be frowned upon. There’s epatering and there’s just plain rude. Oh, and don’t go on ad nauseam about some idee fixe of your own (refer : P Bryant’s anti-American Psycho campaign. Give it a rest, would you?)
IN CONCLUSION, MES AMANTS, MES SEMBLABLES, MES BELLES AMIS ELOIGNES
So reviewers should be zeisty, yes, and geisty too, of course, but don’t be like Ginnie Jones – maybe you young uns won't remember her – erstwhile greatest of all GR reviewers, the karen-before-karen, the best and the most, towering above us all, reviewing every book almost before it was published – whoah, how does she do it we wondered? Oops!! – what a faux pas – she was caught not once, not twice but numerous times in flagrante delicto – in pursuit of her folie de grandeur she had made plagiarism into a cottage industry and swiftly became persona non grata. (At her fall and swift harikiri was there a soupcon of schadenfreude in the air like cordite? I fear there was.) Well, it was a lot of sturm und drang in a teapot of course,
Also, when reviewing it’s probably not a good idea to sound like you’ve swallowed a dictionary.
Whilst it’s very true that this lovely website Goodreads can soothe your cacoethes scribendi nonetheless it can also be injurious to your amour propre. How galling it must be to toil over a time-consuming uberreview and get no comments and no votes from your 143 cold & unfeeling soi-disant friends! (This has happened to me on occasion.) So how should you avoid this sad fate? It’s well to remember that the GR audience is au courant to an unnerving degree – they have read everything, they have strong opinions on every conceivable topic, no mere flaneurs and boulevardiers are they, so your reviews should offer apercus right and left, be brimful of bel esprit with beaucoups of bonbons and bon mots and buckets of bonhomie - you can ask who put the dung in the bildungsroman , you can conduct your own gleeful auto-da-fe for your favourite bete-noir, be outre, be risque, administer the coup de grace to that formerly enfant not so terrible any more (Martin Amis, for instance), you can loft a few ballons d’essai , you can take a glorious stand contra mundum and say loudly and proudly that Twilight is a great work of modern literature, they’ll enjoy that. It’s almost de rigeur to epater those wretched bourgeois all over their weltanschauung. But don’t make ad hominem remarks along the lines of “you Proust-munching gayboy” unless you know the reviewer personally (like, very personally). That would be frowned upon. There’s epatering and there’s just plain rude. Oh, and don’t go on ad nauseam about some idee fixe of your own (refer : P Bryant’s anti-American Psycho campaign. Give it a rest, would you?)
IN CONCLUSION, MES AMANTS, MES SEMBLABLES, MES BELLES AMIS ELOIGNES
So reviewers should be zeisty, yes, and geisty too, of course, but don’t be like Ginnie Jones – maybe you young uns won't remember her – erstwhile greatest of all GR reviewers, the karen-before-karen, the best and the most, towering above us all, reviewing every book almost before it was published – whoah, how does she do it we wondered? Oops!! – what a faux pas – she was caught not once, not twice but numerous times in flagrante delicto – in pursuit of her folie de grandeur she had made plagiarism into a cottage industry and swiftly became persona non grata. (At her fall and swift harikiri was there a soupcon of schadenfreude in the air like cordite? I fear there was.) Well, it was a lot of sturm und drang in a teapot of course,
Also, when reviewing it’s probably not a good idea to sound like you’ve swallowed a dictionary.
May 11, 2014
ISBN? - 9781853263446
General Subject/s? - English / Language / Words
Title? - A list and explanation of foreign words in the English language.
General Analysis? - Good for a language introduction to words not in the English language, but still used. However, there could have been a lot more, particularly from Latin. Nevertheless a focus on words from the French, with some Hebrew, Latin and German, among others.
Recommend? – Maybe.
General Subject/s? - English / Language / Words
Title? - A list and explanation of foreign words in the English language.
General Analysis? - Good for a language introduction to words not in the English language, but still used. However, there could have been a lot more, particularly from Latin. Nevertheless a focus on words from the French, with some Hebrew, Latin and German, among others.
Recommend? – Maybe.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews