by: Barbara Wallraff
Release Date: 28 February, 2006, Media: Hardcover
|
Amazon.com's Price: $9.72
Amazon.com prices subject to change.
Order Today
Availability:
Usually ships in 24 hours
|
Book Description
The perfect book for vocabulary building with new, invented words.
Despite the many thousands of dictionary words at our disposal, our language can be dismayingly inadequate. How many times have you searched for a word that means just what you want it to but failed to find anything suitable anywhere? Most of us, it turns out, lead lives rife with experiences, people, and things that have no names.
At least, they lacked names until now. Word Fugitives comes to the rescue, supplying hundreds of inspired words coined or redefined to meet everyday needs. For instance, wouldn't it be handy to have a word for the momentary confusion people experience when they hear a cell phone ringing and wonder whether it's theirs? (How about fauxcellarm, phonundrum, or pandephonium?)
Or what about a word for offspring who are adults? (Try unchildren or offsprung.) Or a word for the irrational fear when you're throwing a party that no one will show up? (That might be guestlessness, empty-fest syndrome, or fete-alism.)
This mind- and vocabulary-expanding book grew out -- way out -- of Barbara Wallraff's popular column in The Atlantic Monthly. Brimming with irresistible diversions and pop quizzes; illuminated by contributions and commentary from authors, linguists, and leading language authorities; and enlivened by pleas for help from people whose words have yet to be found, Word Fugitives will captivate and inspire anyone who ever struggles to describe the world that he or she, or they, or thon (thon? see page 141) lives in.
User Reviews
Rating 5 - Word Fun at its Finest
Barbara Wallraff has written one of the most fun word books I have yet to read. We are always looking for new ways to express ourselves and she not only acknowledges the wisdom of this practice, but makes it safe and secure while fitting the neologisms into the existing structure with care and panache.
Rating 5 - Like a Machete
Every language in the world has the capability of producing an infinite number of words. Just think of constructions like "anti-ballistic missile" or "anti-anti ballistic missile" or "anti-anti-anti ballistic missile" and so on. After awhile, making them up becomes a bore. Not so in "Word Fugitives." Here the trick is to come up with words to name situations as yet unnamed. What do you call the feeling, for example, just after you thought you had stepped off the curb and suddenly realized you were falling? Bad news? "Word Fugitives" does much better than that. It is a funhouse of a book, finding new words for old situations in clever, amusing and quite unexpected ways. This book is first and foremost fun to read. Then it will provoke you. And finally, it will enlighten you. For those of you lost in the thicket of lexicography, this book is a machete.
Rating 5 - Word Fugitives
I thought that English was a rich language, with special terms for everything, until I read Word Fugitives, having heard about it on NPR. There are so many missing terms - holes in the language, as Barbara Wallraff calls them - and so many ways to plug them. This book is full of the solutions, all wonderful and funny. One favorite: getting in one line at the supermarket only to find another moving faster - what is it? Misalinement. How can I get my favorite new word to stick? Umm...that's another matter, and Word Fugitives has some tips.
All in all, a really amusing vocabulary builder.
