The Disheveled Dictionary: A Curious Caper Through Our Sumptuous Lexicon - Hardcover

Gordon, Karen Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395689902 ISBN 13: 9780395689905

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1997

Synopsis

The Disheveled Dictionary takes a voluptuary's approach to language, carousing in a wanton world of words and their multiple and mischievous uses. Favorite characters from earlier books appear in cameo, including Yolanta, Jonquil Mapp, cowboys with lingerie, and assorted royal riffraff, who join in adumbration with the Grim Reaper, a reluctant baba, the contralto Constanza Zermattress, and other inspired creations.

About this title

Review:

Pretty little novelty vocabulary books often provide unimaginative, unpoetic definitions for strange and beautiful words that one could never imagine actually using in a sentence. Karen Elizabeth Gordon's Disheveled Dictionary is quite the opposite. Gordon offers up usable if somewhat underused words (such as "amplitude," "crepuscular," "maudlin," and "recidivistic"), many of which we're not quite sure we know the exact meaning, illustrating them in the wildly creative fashion that she has perfected in her grammar texts (The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, The New Well-Tempered Sentence, and Torn Wings and Faux Pas). "The more ample one's lexicon," writes Gordon (as her alter ego "Yolanta") in the book's preface, "the more supple one's thought, the more daring, charged, engaged." "Jonquil Mapp," another of Gordon's stable of crafty characters, adds that "What's most exciting ... is not where a word has been but where it's going, what you will make of it."

This book is best described by example, so here is Gordon's illustrative use of that excessive pride or self-confidence we call "hubris": " Adipose Rex, a modern drama with ancient Greek overtones, is about a king whose hubris vis-a-vis his heart and his tragic proclivity for tiropitas, pastitsio, and baklava bring on his comeuppance coronary." --Jane Steinberg

About the Author:

Karen Elizabeth Gordon is the author of the classic and comic reference books The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, The New Well-Tempered Sentence, and Torn Wings and Faux Pas. Her wanderlusting fiction includes The Ravenous Muse, The Red Shoes and Other Tattered Tales, and Paris Out of Hand. She lives in Berkeley, California and Paris.

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0395689902
• ISBN 13: 9780395689905
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 162