I'm Leaving You, Simon - You Disgust Me : The Dictionary of Received Ideas - Hardcover

Donaldson, William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0304365750 ISBN 13: 9780304365753

Publisher: Cassell, 2003

Synopsis

Spoken and written language is littered with cliches, but there are some usages - smug statements of secondhand opinion, grating nuggets of folk wisdom, toe-curling verbal flourishes of the would-be authoritative - that go beyond the bounds of cliche to enter more desperate linguistic territory. We encounter these verbal horrors every day of our lives - in conversations overheard on tube, train and bus and at suburban dinner parties, in the fictional dialogues of TV drama - and even in the glib formulations of TV sports commentators. They are disparate in nature - but have one thing in common: they all represent desperate attempts on the part of the speaker to persuade the listener that certainty of language mirrors certainty of thought and intellect, to project a verbal front of decidedness, authority and knowledge. Willie Donaldson has turned his finely tuned satirical ear to these verbal inanities to create a unique, offbeat and entirely hilarious dictionary of cringemaking Islingtonian phrasemaking.But the twist is this: lurking behind the A-Z facade is a dramatis personae of gabbling middle-class archetypes, including the Simon of the title - a Canonbury-based wine importer - and his overwrought partner, Susan, a university academic. Their excruciating dialogues - conversational nightmares of pat phrases, glib opinion and conjugal bitchiness played out in the fictional context of a Barnsbury tapas bar named the Goya - are brilliantly captured by the author, and make this most individual of books a candidate for humour title of the year.

About this title

About the Author

William Donaldson was educated at Winchester and Cambridge and went into the theatre, producing Beyond the Fringe and The Bedsitting Room. His novels include Both the Ladies and the Gentlemen, Nicknames Only and Is This Allowed? His trivia include The Henry Root Letters, The Further Letters of Henry Root, Henry Root's World of Knowledge and Root Into Europe (filmed by ITV, 1991). His latest book, Brewer's Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics, received rave reviews on publication in autumn 2002.

Review

'buy the book for all your friends and relatives this Christmas... it's frighteningly accurate in its summary of middlebrow cultural truisms... and, in that characteristically bone-dry Donaldson manner, very, very funny.' -- James Delingpole THE SPECTATOR 'his latest tome, like a very decent Australian Shiraz, really knocks your socks off... in this wonderful book, William Donaldson has assembled the most comprehensive collection of cliches, affectations and dinner-party vacuities that you could possibly dream of.' -- Oliver Pritchett SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'dreaming up a cast of Islington insufferables to illustrate his definitions is a good wheeze' -- Catherine Shoard THE EVENING STANDARD

Edition details

• Publisher: Cassell
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0304365750
• ISBN 13: 9780304365753
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 256