Word Fugitives: In Pursuit of Wanted Words

by Barbara Wallraff

Book Overview

Despite the many thousands of dictionary words at our disposal, our language can be dismayingly inadequate. How many times have you searched for a word that means just what you want it to but failed... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060832738
• ISBN13: 9780060832735
• Release Date: February 2006
• Publisher: Harper
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 7.1"

Customer Reviews

Clever and funny

All wordsmiths, and even those who just like to laugh, will enjoy this very clever and funny book which is, in many ways, a good-natured spoof on our culture, values and outlook.

Wide world of words gets wilder !

This fantastic mind expanding book has grown out of Ms.Barbara Wallraff's column in The Atlantic Monthly. Something that I have followed for years. It overflows with diversions, (e.g. "English hasn't had a new pronoun for about a thousand years, and there is no sign it will acquire one any time soon") quizzes, contributions and comments from people who are authorities, linguists, authors and plus the fact that it is made sprightly cheerful by supplications from people who are groping for words that remain to be found. Quoted as "English at a Loss for Words",even when Global Language Monitor, an organization estimates there are more than 900,000 words in the English language, and more are being added every day. To explain about this book, even when we know that feeling it is often that we are not able to find the exact word that defines it - often that word does not exist, (Or it is a sniglet - "word that should be in the dictionary, but isn't) - despite the exuberant and extravagant richness of our language. This endeavor by Ms. Wallraff proves, and I am beginning to be convinced that perhaps even language such as English is dismayingly inadequate. This book comes to rescue providing hundreds of words minted, coined, redefined or delimitated. Just like when you're looking for a word that can mean either "a phantom" or "an ideal" -- eidolon would come handy. - People who blabber loudly and annoyingly on cell-phones in public? Yakasses. - Disposable plastic bags caught in trees? Fouliage. - And when look up a word in a dictionary, and get distracted by something totally off the subject, on the other side of the page? This is called double-entry-bookpeeping. Or is it lexploring? - What would you say of the times your car or washing machine or TV breaks down, and you pay a repairman to take a look at it, but when he or she - turns it on , IT WORKS ! you can call it deus hex machine. Or how about? Hocus operandi? Another example to serve the purpose - like what would you call the experience of having recently heard about something for the first time and then starting to notice it everywhere? How are toujours vu, newbiquitous or coincidensity. What would you call the feeling when you revisit the same refrigerator you had left disappointed few minutes ago, hoping to find - this time, the perfect snack -- which you overlooked before. Well that's leftoveractive imagination. Other choices such as Cold comfort, refrigerator magnetism, smorgasboredom, and freonnui have also been suggested. Somebody has even called it stirvation another one terms it as procrastifrigeration. Would it be handy to use a word for that momentary confusion everyone experiences when they hear a cell phone ringing and wonder if it is theirs? There - fauxcellarm, phonundrum, pandephonium , phonundrum , ringchronicity , ringmarole or ringxiety are the suggested choices. And what would like to call your offspring who are adults? (Try unchildren or offsprung.) Or the

Word Fun at its Finest

Barbara Wallraff has written one of the most fun word books I have yet to read. We are always looking for new ways to express ourselves and she not only acknowledges the wisdom of this practice, but makes it safe and secure while fitting the neologisms into the existing structure with care and panache.

Machete

Every language in the world has the capability of producing an infinite number of words. Just think of constructions like "anti-ballistic missile" or "anti-anti ballistic missile" or "anti-anti-anti ballistic missile" and so on. After awhile, making them up becomes a bore. Not so in "Word Fugitives." Here the trick is to come up with words to name situations as yet unnamed. What do you call the feeling, for example, just after you thought you had stepped off the curb and suddenly realized you were falling? Bad news? "Word Fugitives" does much better than that. It is a funhouse of a book, finding new words for old situations in clever, amusing and quite unexpected ways. This book is first and foremost fun to read. Then it will provoke you. And finally, it will enlighten you. For those of you lost in the thicket of lexicography, this book is a machete.

word fugitives

I thought that English was a rich language, with special terms for everything, until I read Word Fugitives, having heard about it on NPR. There are so many missing terms - holes in the language, as Barbara Wallraff calls them - and so many ways to plug them. This book is full of the solutions, all wonderful and funny. One favorite: getting in one line at the supermarket only to find another moving faster - what is it? Misalinement. How can I get my favorite new word to stick? Umm...that's another matter, and Word Fugitives has some tips. All in all, really amusing.