Editorial Reviews: |
|
How would you translate "La Belle Dame sans Merci" into French? How did the British come to pronounce Churchtown "chow-zen"? And which words really follow "Alas, poor Yorick"? If your brain cranes for poems created solely from baseball players' nicknames ("Catfish, Mudcat, Ducky, Coot"), 40-letter German curse words, and other linguistic novelties, Willard Espy's Best of an Almanac of Words at Play--culled from Espy's earlier An Almanac of Words at Play and Another Almanac of Words at Play--will distract you from all kinds of less trivial pursuits. Included here are malapropisms courtesy of Shakespeare, a John Updike satire on sports writing, and any number of stinky pinkies, spoonerisms, pangrams, macaronics, clerihews and lipograms. Espy, who died during the fashioning of this volume, insisted that words not be taken too seriously. "Treat words", he said, "the way such wise men as Lewis Carroll, W S Gilbert, Ogden Nash, and Cole Porter treated them: as a gorgeous joke". Even better, he said, housebreak them. "Teach your words to sit, lie, stay, fetch. Reward them for obedience and cleverness...For a few rare people they not only roll over and play dead, but walk on their hind legs." --Jane Steinberg
|
|
|
|
United States | 
United Kingdom | 
Canada