An up-and-down yet mostly amusing collection. Many readers will skim the short analyses while enjoying the examples and...
Common expressions gain richness of meaning through mistakes in word usage.
As an editor at the New Yorker, Menaker (My Mistake, 2013) often encountered phrases from fledgling writers in which a sound-alike word, mistaken for the right one, would add a whole new dimension to the meaning of a phrase. Take, for example, “the throws of packing,” which replaces a word that many could not define (“throes”) with a common, action-packed one that suggests the way so many of us pack, throwing things here and there into piles, boxes, or suitcases. Or, “pass mustard.” Even fewer might be able to define the correct “muster” or use it in any other context. But “mustard” provides a visual dimension, however incongruous, and it perhaps relates to another phrase, “too old to cut the mustard,” which is linguistically unrelated but could become confused in the mind. Some of the entries proceed from a different impulse and gain poetic resonance, such as “sobbing wet,” which seems to suggest something different and sadder than “sopping.” And having a “self of steam” could easily apply to someone suffering from low self-esteem. New Yorker illustrator Chast (Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, 2014, etc.) is typically brilliant when the cues call for visualization, especially with the stomach X-ray for “end-trails” and “something that really gets my gander up” (another one of those where most readers couldn’t define the correct “dander” or use it in any other context). There is even one selection that could spark a geographical debate, since “chile peppers” is common parlance from Texas through the Southwest, even though “Red Hot Chile Peppers” would not be correct as the band’s name. Acclaimed poet Billy Collins provides the foreword.
An up-and-down yet mostly amusing collection. Many readers will skim the short analyses while enjoying the examples and illustrations.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-80063-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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