Download or read book The Official Dictionary of Idiocy written by James Napoli and published by Union Square + ORM. This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Get your snark on, with this hilarious compendium from the author of The Official Dictionary of Sarcasm. It’s the perfect book for today’s world. The battle for sanity and intelligence rages on! Read any news story today and it’s clear that idiots are everywhere. For that reason, James Napoli, the esteemed director of the National Sarcasm Society, has created a smart-aleck new dictionary that defines pop-culture touchstones and throws shade on the hopelessly foolish. With copiously illustrated and snarky entries on everything from “Alternative Facts” and “Congress” to “Cable News” and “Uber” (A convenient way to entrust your transportation to a potential serial killer . . .”), The Official Dictionary of Idiocy brings some much-needed laughter to these crazy days.
Download or read book The Official Dictionary of Sarcasm written by James Napoli and published by Union Square + ORM. This book was released on 2010-09-07 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tolerate ignorance? Really? So not necessary. This laugh-out-loud dictionary is the perfect lesson in snarkiness. Why suffer the tiny minds of the plebian rabble with whom you come in daily contact, reasons James Napoli, executive vice president of the National Sarcasm Society. So, with The Official Dictionary of Sarcasm, he provides an A–Z guide to turn to whenever you need to set someone straight. From advertisements to e-mail, materialism to remote controls, there’s a witty answer for every situation. “You have been waiting patiently for a dictionary like this to come along. And now it is here,” recognizes Napoli. “Not that you give a crap.”
Download or read book A Dictionary of Idiocy written by Stephen Bayley and published by Gibson Square,All. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wittgenstein said that if people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever happen. In this fun compendium to modern life, Stephen Bayley gathers silly, curious and sometimes shocking facts on the everything that make our world tick. Ranging widely from cars, Jackson Pollock and insults, to nudity, wine and perfume, he has put together a collection of general ignorance. You'll be surprised at how much you don't know.
Download or read book A Dictionary of Idiocy written by Stephen Bayley and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unputdownable A-Z of modern ignorance, gathers silly, curious and sometimes shocking facts on everything that makes our world tick.
Download or read book The Official Dictionary of Sarcasm Sex and Relationships written by James Napoli and published by Sterling. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers brief and sarcastic explanations of topics related to sex, relationships, and love.
Download or read book Big Bad Ass Book of Dreams written by Klausbernd Vollmar and published by Sterling Innovation. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lighthearted look at dream interpretation.
Download or read book The Devil s Dictionary or The Cynic s Wordbook Unabridged with all the Definitions written by Ambrose Bierce and published by e-artnow. This book was released on 2013-08-20 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This carefully crafted ebook: "The Devil's Dictionary (or The Cynic's Wordbook: Unabridged with all the Definitions)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. The book is a classic satire in the form of a dictionary on which Bierce worked for decades. It was originally published in 1906 as The Cynic's Word Book before being retitled in 1911. A number of the definitions are accompanied by satiric verses, many of which are signed with comic pseudonyms. It offers reinterpretations of terms in the English language which lampoon cant and political double-talk as well as other aspects of human foolishness and frailty. The definitions provide satirical, witty and often politically pointed representations of the words that is seeks to "define". The Devil's Dictionary has inspired many imitations both in its day and more recently. Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (1842 – 1914?) was an American satirist, critic, poet, editor and journalist. Bierce became a prolific author of short stories often humorous and sometimes bitter or macabre. His dark, sardonic views and vehemence as a critic earned him the nickname, "Bitter Bierce".
Download or read book Images of Idiocy written by Martin Halliwell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the concept of idiocy as it has developed in fiction and film in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It focuses particularly on visual images of idiocy and argues that writers as diverse as Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad, John Steinbeck, Flannery O'Connor and Rohinton Mistry, and filmmakers such as Jean Renoir, Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, Werner Herzog and John Huston have all been attracted to idiot figures as a way of thinking through issues of language acquisition, intelligence, creativity, disability, religion and social identity. Martin Halliwell provides a lively and detailed discussion of the most significant literary and cinematic uses of idiocy, arguing that scientific conceptions of the term as a classifiable medical condition are much too narrow. With the explosion of interest in idiocy among American and European filmmakers in the 1990s and the growing interest in its often overlooked history, this book offers a timely reassessment of idiocy and its distinctive place at the intersection of science and culture.
Download or read book Word by Word written by Kory Stamper and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-03-06 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets.” With wit and irreverence, lexicographer Kory Stamper cracks open the obsessive world of dictionary writing, from the agonizing decisions about what to define and how to do it to the knotty questions of ever-changing word usage. Filled with fun facts—for example, the first documented usage of “OMG” was in a letter to Winston Churchill—and Stamper’s own stories from the linguistic front lines (including how she became America’s foremost “irregardless” apologist, despite loathing the word), Word by Word is an endlessly entertaining look at the wonderful complexities and eccentricities of the English language.
Download or read book The Word Exchange written by Alena Graedon and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dystopian novel for the digital age, The Word Exchange offers an inventive, suspenseful, and decidedly original vision of the dangers of technology and of the enduring power of the printed word. In the not-so-distant future, the forecasted “death of print” has become a reality. Bookstores, libraries, newspapers, and magazines are things of the past, and we spend our time glued to handheld devices called Memes that not only keep us in constant communication but also have become so intuitive that they hail us cabs before we leave our offices, order takeout at the first growl of a hungry stomach, and even create and sell language itself in a marketplace called the Word Exchange. Anana Johnson works with her father, Doug, at the North American Dictionary of the English Language (NADEL), where Doug is hard at work on the last edition that will ever be printed. Doug is a staunchly anti-Meme, anti-tech intellectual who fondly remembers the days when people used email (everything now is text or videoconference) to communicate—or even actually spoke to one another, for that matter. One evening, Doug disappears from the NADEL offices, leaving a single written clue: ALICE. It’s a code word he devised to signal if he ever fell into harm’s way. And thus begins Anana’s journey down the proverbial rabbit hole . . . Joined by Bart, her bookish NADEL colleague, Anana’s search for Doug will take her into dark basements and subterranean passageways; the stacks and reading rooms of the Mercantile Library; and secret meetings of the underground resistance, the Diachronic Society. As Anana penetrates the mystery of her father’s disappearance and a pandemic of decaying language called “word flu” spreads, The Word Exchange becomes a cautionary tale that is at once a technological thriller and a meditation on the high cultural costs of digital technology.
Download or read book Word Perfect written by Susie Dent and published by John Murray. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Susie Dent is a one-off. She breathes life and fun into words and language' Pam Ayres 'Susie Dent is a national treasure' Richard Osman Welcome to a year of wonder with Susie Dent, lexicographer, logophile, and longtime queen of Countdown's Dictionary Corner. From the real Jack the Lad to the theatrically literal story behind stealing someone's thunder, from tartle (forgetting someone's name at the very moment you need it) to snaccident (the unintentional eating of an entire packet of biscuits), WORD PERFECT is a brilliant linguistic almanac full of unforgettable stories, fascinating facts, and surprising etymologies tied to every day of the year. You'll never be lost for words again.
Download or read book Dictionary of Idiocy written by Stephen Bayley and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides a light-hearted guide for the perplexed to all things trivial. Wittgenstein said that if people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever happen. As human progress depends on the continuing practice of stupidity, Stephen Bayley investigates in this book what is necessary for human progress. Some instances of stupidity are only clearly stupid after the fact such as the astonishing amount of money poured into Internet start-ups, others rely on ideas which are stupid on their own. The Ship of Follies of the World in 1509, even the perplexed will find their way through the maze of progress and common sense. An original miscellany for those who want their trivia served up with panache. The inspiration for this collection comes from Flaubert's Dictionnaire des Idees Recues, published for the first time in October 1904.
Download or read book Spinglish written by Henry Beard and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spinglish—the devious dialect of English used by professional spin doctors—is all around us. And the fact is, until you’ve mastered it, politicians and corporations (not to mention your colleagues and friends) will continue putting things over on you, and generally getting the better of you, every minute of every day—without your even knowing it. However, once you perfect the art of terminological inexactitude, you’ll be the one manipulating and one-upping everyone else! And here’s the beauty part: Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf, authors of the New York Times semi-bestseller The Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook, have compiled this handy yet astonishingly comprehensive lexicon and translation guide—a fictionary, if you will—to help you do just that. If you want to succeed in business (or politics, sports, the arts, or life in general) without really lying, this is the book for you! (Your results may vary.) Spinglish includes these nifty bits of spurious verbiage and over a thousand more: aesthetic procedure – face-lift dairy nutrients – cow manure enhanced interrogation techniques – torture “For your convenience.” – “For our convenience.” hands-on mentoring – sexual relations with a junior employee incomplete success – failure rightsizing – firing people zero-tasking – doing nothing With each and every entry sourced from some of the greatest real-life language benders in the world today, you’re virtually guaranteed to have the perfectly chosen tried-and-untrue term right at the tip of your forked tongue. Wish you could nimbly sidestep a question without batting an eye? Not sure how to apologize while also . . . not apologizing? Spinglish has you covered. Simply consult this convenient, shoot-from-the-lip glossary, and before you know it, you’ll be telling it like it isn’t, it wasn’t, and it couldn’t ever have been.
Download or read book The Encyclop dia of Stupidity written by Matthijs van Boxsel and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author shows how stupidity manifests itself in all areas, in everyone, at all times: stupidity is the foundation of our civilization. He posits that stupidity is a condition for intelligence, that blunders stimulate progress and that failure is the basis for success.
Download or read book Dictionary of the Undoing written by John Freeman and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2020-01-16 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For John Freeman - literary critic, essayist, editor, poet and 'one of the preeminent book people of our time' (Dave Eggers) - it is a rare moment when words are not enough. But in the wake of the election of 2016, words felt useless, even indulgent. Action was the only reasonable response. He took to the streets in protest and the sense of community and collective conviction felt right. But the assaults continued - on citizens' rights and long-held compacts, on the core principles of our culture and civilisation, and on our language itself. Words seemed to be losing the meanings they once had and Freeman was compelled to return to their defence. The result is his Dictionary of the Undoing. From A to Z, 'Agitate' to 'Zygote,' Freeman assembled the words that felt most essential, most potent, and began to build a case for their renewed power and authority, each word building on the last. The message that emerged was not to retreat behind books, but to emphatically engage in the public sphere, to redefine what it means to be a literary citizen. With an afterword by Valeria Luiselli, Dictionary of the Undoing is a necessary, resounding cri de coeur in defense of language, meaning, and our ability to imagine, describe, and build a better world.
Download or read book A Dictionary of Psychological Medicine written by Daniel Hack Tuke and published by . This book was released on 1892 with total page 854 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Those They Called Idiots written by Simon Jarrett and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2020-11-05 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Those They Called Idiots traces the little-known lives of people with learning disabilities from the communities of eighteenth-century England to the nineteenth-century asylum, to care in today’s society. Using evidence from civil and criminal courtrooms, joke books, slang dictionaries, novels, art, and caricature, it explores the explosive intermingling of ideas about intelligence and race, while bringing into sharp focus the lives of people often seen as the most marginalized in society.
