A lively collection of sharp retorts and ripostes, pithy pot, ricocheting bombast - caustic quips, and polite, and the definitely unpolite, sort of put downs. This book can either be read for the sheer fiendish fun of it, or it can be put to work as a sourcebook for anyboday - speakers, entertainers, managers, writers - who wishes to communicate a little more forcefully. Carefully categorised according to targets, this book can be used time and time again to deflate egotists, dispose of bores and demolish dummies.
The 'Lines For All Occasions' series provides a superb collection of these much needed phrases for all manner of breakup, rejection, excuse, lie, come-on, or insult situations - ranging from the diplomatic to the downright bridge burning.
n A Slap in the Face, William Irvine undertakes a wide-ranging investigation of insults, their history, the role they play in social relationships, and the science behind them. He offers advice, based primarily on the writings of the Stoic philosophers, on how best to curb our own insulting tendencies and how to respond to the insults that are directed our way. A rousing follow-up to The Good Life, A Slap in the Face will interest anyone who's ever delivered an insult or felt the sting of one--in other words, everyone.
Why Did Steve Allen Cross the Road? Steve Allen is a legend among comedians and entertainers. He's been playing to audiences on stage, radio, film, and television for more than fifty years, gaining acclaim for his unique wit and energy. Now for the first time, he shares more than a thousand of his favorite one-liners, anecdotes, limericks, quotes, and other generally funny things. The entries are divided into nearly two hundred categories to make it easy for anyone to find the right laugh for any occasion. If you're faced with the prospect of having to "say a few words," Steve Allen's Private Joke File is the perfect place to look for ideas and inspiration on such topics as awards, drinking, baseball, lawyers, dentists, insurance, marriage, the stock market, and dozens of other subjects. A sampling: * My wife and I had words, but I never got to use mine! * If ignorance is bliss, he should die of joy. * "How are the acoustics here?" "Great, I can hardly hear you!" * I learned to rumba very early in life ... I had a tricycle with a loose seat. * Room for rent, by young lady, freshly plastered. Steve Allen has also included a number of his favorite essays and monologues. Steve Allen's Private Joke File is great to flip through for fun or for function, and for those of us looking for a good laugh -- to give one or to have one -- it's indispensable.
A New York Times Best Illustrated Book From highly acclaimed author Jenkins and Caldecott Medal–winning illustrator Blackall comes a fascinating picture book in which four families, in four different cities, over four centuries, make the same delicious dessert: blackberry fool. This richly detailed book ingeniously shows how food, technology, and even families have changed throughout American history. In 1710, a girl and her mother in Lyme, England, prepare a blackberry fool, picking wild blackberries and beating cream from their cow with a bundle of twigs. The same dessert is prepared by an enslaved girl and her mother in 1810 in Charleston, South Carolina; by a mother and daughter in 1910 in Boston; and finally by a boy and his father in present-day San Diego. Kids and parents alike will delight in discovering the differences in daily life over the course of four centuries. Includes a recipe for blackberry fool and notes from the author and illustrator about their research.
Garfield, the feline master of the ironic aside, puts his paw to the grindstone and lets loose with these gems: good-natured insults, purr-fect put-downs, and deceptively sweet slams. For the young, the old, and the cranky at heart, Garfield knows how you feel sometimes—and he says it, in so many words.
A cross between Henry Beard's Latin for All Occasions and Ben Schott's Schott's Original Miscellany, JUST SAY NU is a practical guide to using Yiddish words and expressions in day-to-day situations. Along with enough grammar to enable readers to put together a comprehensible sentence and avoid embarrassing mistakes, Wex also explains the five most useful Yiddish words–shoyn, nu, epes, takeh,and nebakh–what they mean, how and when to use them, and how they can be used to conduct an entire conversation without anybody ever suspecting that the reader doesn't have the vaguest idea of what anyone is actually saying. Readers will learn how to shmooze their way through such activities as meeting and greeting; eating and drinking; praising and finding fault; maintaining personal hygiene; going to the doctor; driving; parenting; getting horoscopes; committing crimes; going to singles bars; having sex; talking politics and talking trash. Now that Stephen Colbert, a Catholic from South Carolina and host of the "Colbert Report," is using Yiddish to wish viewers a bright and happy Chanukah, people have finally started to realize that there's nothing in the world that can't be improved by translating it into Yiddish. Wex's JUST SAY NU is the book that's going to show them how.
The award-winning author of The Net Delusion shows how the radical transparency we've become accustomed to online may threaten the spirit of real-life democracy
“I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.”—Groucho Marx An insult can be offensive and infuriating, but it means nothing if you have a better comeback. 1001 Insults, Put-Downs, and Comebacks gathers together the very sharpest of these barbs from a wide variety of sources, with some of the wickedest put-downs from the literary, political, and entertainment worlds, along with many others.
The sharpest stings ever to snap from the tip of an English-speaking tongue are here at hand, ready to be directed at the knaves, villains, and coxcombs of the reader's choice. Culled from 38 plays, here are the best 5,000 examples of Shakespeare's glorious invective, arranged by play, in order of appearance, with helpful act and line numbers for easy reference, along with an index of topical scorn appropriate to particular characters and occasions.
