Product Description: The Devil's Dictionary is a satirical dictionary written by American journalist and author Ambrose Bierce. Originally published in 1906 as The Cynic's Word Book, it features Bierce's witty and often ironic spin on many common English words...read more

Product Description: The Devil's Dictionary is a satirical dictionary written by American journalist and author Ambrose Bierce. Originally published in 1906 as The Cynic's Word Book, it features Bierce's witty and often ironic spin on many common English words...read more

Product Description: "The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary" is a virtual onslaught of acerbic, confrontational wordplay, offering some 1,600 wickedly clever definitions to the vocabulary of everyday life. Little is sacred and few are safe, for Ambrose Bierce targets just about any pursuit, from matrimony to immortality, that allows our willful failings and excesses to shine forth...read more

Fresh-squeezed Lexicology, with TwistsNo man of letters savors the ABC’s, or serves them up, like language-loving humorist Roy Blount Jr. His glossary, from ad hominy to zizz, is hearty, full bodied, and out to please discriminating palates coarse and fine. In 2008, he celebrated the gists, tangs, and energies of letters and their combinations in Alphabet Juice, to wide acclaim. Now, Alphabetter Juice. Which is better.This book is for anyone—novice wordsmith, sensuous reader, or career grammarian—who loves to get physical with words. What is the universal sign of disgust, ew, doing in beautiful and cutie? Why is toadless, but not frogless, in the Oxford English Dictionary? How can the U. S. Supreme Court find relevance in gollywoddles? Might there be scientific evidence for the sonicky value of hunch? And why would someone not bother to spell correctly the very word he is trying to define on Urbandictionary.com?Digging into how locutions evolve, and work, or fail, Blount draws upon everything from The Tempest to The Wire. He takes us to Iceland, for salmon-watching with a “girl gillie,” and to Georgian England, where a distinguished etymologist bites off more of a “giantess” than he can chew. Jimmy Stewart appears, in connection with kludge and the bombing of Switzerland. Litigation over supercalifragilisticexpialidocious leads to a vintage werewolf movie; news of possum-tossing, to metanarrative.As Michael Dirda wrote in The Washington Post Book World, “The immensely likeable Blount clearly possesses what was called in the Italian Renaissance ‘sprezzatura,’ that rare and enviable ability to do even the most difficult things without breaking a sweat.” Alphabetter Juice is brimming with sprezzatura. Have a taste.

Product Description: A new and beautifully illustrated collection of bitter, biting definitions to celebrate the centenary of The Devil’s Dictionary Ambrose Bierce’s classic The Devil’s Dictionary first appeared in its entirety in 1911. Its caustic wit and arch tone have ensured steady popularity and sales to this day...read more

Ali G: How many words does you know?Noam Chomsky: Normally, humans, by maturity, have tens of thousands of them.Ali G: What is some of 'em?—Da Ali G Show Did you know that both mammal and matter derive from baby talk? Have you noticed how wince makes you wince? Ever wonder why so many h-words have to do with breath? Roy Blount Jr. certainly has, and after forty years of making a living using words in every medium, print or electronic, except greeting cards, he still can’t get over his ABCs. In Alphabet Juice, he celebrates the electricity, the juju, the sonic and kinetic energies, of letters and their combinations. Blount does not prescribe proper English. The franchise he claims is “over the counter.” Three and a half centuries ago, Thomas Blount produced Blount’s Glossographia, the first dictionary to explore derivations of English words. This Blount’s Glossographia takes that pursuit to other levels, from Proto-Indo-European roots to your epiglottis. It rejects the standard linguistic notion that the connection between words and their meanings is “arbitrary.” Even the word arbitrary is shown to be no more arbitrary, at its root, than go-to guy or crackerjack. From sources as venerable as the OED (in which Blount finds an inconsistency, at whisk) and as fresh as Urbandictionary.com (to which Blount has contributed the number-one definition of alligator arm), and especially from the author’s own wide-ranging experience, Alphabet Juice derives an organic take on language that is unlike, and more fun than, any other.

Product Description: At last, a book for the American Idle. Here is a punny new dictionary of inventive definitions of real words.Acrimony: Spousal support payments following bitter divorceFriction: Novel that rubs you the wrong wayNegligence: Woman's forgotten dressing gownZinfandel: Heathen wine Ranging from the merely fetched (Spaniel: Iberian canine) to the far-fetched (Buccaneer: Piracy in corn pricing) to the neurologically suspect (Giraffe: Very tall spotted decanter), Semantricks will surprise, delight, and even stump the most word-wary pundits...read more

Product Description: The only reference that collects words which are too new for dictionaries but absolutely perfect when heard in context, this collection of 1,000 "unwords" contains plenty of indispensable terms. What to call yucky slime at the tip of a lotion dispenser? Accumulotion, of course! How to refer to a receding hairline? A former forehead is now a fivehead...read more

For decades academics in many universities have been churning out fashionable nonsense, creating entirely new academic disciplines such as difference feminism, deconstructionism, the sociology of knowledge.

Product Description: Pompous jargon pervades English these days, from corporate speak to silly legalisms. This lighthearted look at how English is being mangled reveals the underlying meaning, as well as the attitudes behind the meaning, of more than 1,000 buzzwords...read more

Presents an updated collection of hypothetical and satirical terms and phrases that may come into use sometime in a utopian future world, featuring contributions by Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Olen Butler, Jonathan Franzen, Edwidge Danticat, Art Spiegelman, Julia Alvarez, and others.

Product Description: This is volume two of the much-acclaimed first volume The Skeptic's Dictionary. Witty and irreverent definitions, quotations and limericks. It is a sourcebook for literates and a must-have for writers, toastmasters, public speakers and conversationalists everywhere...read more

Product Description: In order to allow you to understand Pundits, Newscasters, Newsreaders, Politicians, Bureaucrats, Mandarins, Officials, your Government, Neo-Cons And assorted Newspeak users.