'Words are not only tools; they are also weapons.' Peter Bowler's guides, as his thousands of fans worldwide already know, are witty, charming, and clever volumes that introduce weird and wonderful words. Now the three volumes are published in a collected edition for the first time to provide words to help you wriggle out of sticky debates, deal with obnoxious dinner guests and fill in sick leave application forms with panache. A picturesque panoply of words of which neither you nor anyone else has ever heard, Bowler provides not only an expanded range of words themselves, but also a genuine sense how to employ them to devastating effect. The Completely Superior Person's Book of Words is an arsenal of over a thousand sonifacient verbal weapons with which to verbigerate your friends and gorgonise your enemies.
ADULT LITERACY GUIDES & HANDBOOKS. This is a tongue-in-cheek guide to words that any smart, well-educated, pretentious person should be able to drop into cocktail conversation.The reader is encouraged to toss off words such as 'Disestablishmentarianism', 'descant', and 'autodidactic', proving, if not the value of a good education, at least the appearance of a good education.Each word is accompanied by a pronunciation guide and a sentence illustrating its use. Some of the sentences are made up, while others are well-known quotations.
"With his customary wit and clear-sightedness, Bowler cuts a swath through the thickets of popular jargon, casting daylight on such linguistic deformities as "interrogate with prejudice" (that is, torture) and "unforeseen geological event" (a mining disaster). Impatient with euphemism, he examines ugly specimens forced into bloom in the interests of political correctness - "waitperson," "developmentally challenged" - designed to help the squeamish avoid direct confrontation with the simple facts of sex and disability. Here are circumlocutions that make the disagreeable seem agreeable, the unacceptable acceptable, and here is Peter Bowler, as always, trying to set the record, and the English language, straight."--BOOK JACKET.
Deida explores the most important issues in men's lives--from career and family to women and intimacy to love and spirituality--to offer a practical guidebook for living a masculine life of integrity, authenticity, and freedom.
'Words are not only tools; they are also weapons' The secret to being a truly Superior Person is to use really superior words. More impressive than a top hat, much more effective than a fist-fight, here are five hundred words to help you wiggle out of sticky debates, deal with obnoxious dinner guests and fill in sick leave application forms with panache. Impress your friends, amaze your colleagues and baffle your enemies with this witty, charming, and clever little book.
What Bowler manages to do in this omnium gatherum of over 1,000 words that all of us have (very) occasionally heard but have no idea how to use, is not only to provide their definitions (easy enough) but also to offer, for the first time, practical advice on how to use these words in real-life situations"€"to confound your friends, irritate your enemies, and impress your superiors. Thus the reader will not only learn the meaning of aprosexia, but also how best to use it when filling out their sick leave application form. Sample sentences, in comprehensible and often hilarious prose, are given for every word providing a verbal arsenal potent enough to "confuse, deter, embarrass, humiliate, puzzle, deceive, disconcert, alarm, insult (and occasionally compliment) everyone" with relative impunity. Learn only a hundred or so of these and confirm the author's ambition to give you, his readers, "a more finely tuned engine of the language they speak, so they more readily assert their linguistic superiority over their fellow travelers at the traffic stops of life." And there's still more: anecdotes of eccentric scholars, unbelievable tales of the cupidity and stupidity of the rich and famous, examples of idiot conceits and further curiosities of the so-called intellectual life. Now, all of this in one elegant softcover volume, with flaps, an unbelievable bargain at $24.95.