Susie Dent

This book contains a wide variety of emotion-related words and expressions—mostly from English, but other languages, particularly French, get a look in when they have a single world that encapsulates an entire English phrase. Overall the book was good, although one of the entries featuring an Inuktitut word put me off because the word was described as “unpronounceable”. I’m sure Inuit can pronounce the word just fine. That comment struck a judgmental note for me, especially because most of the other entries about words in languages other than English didn’t talk that way the words.

This is the sort of book that works better as a flip-through rather than a cover-to-cover read; I got tired around R and had to return the book to the library because there were holds on it.… (altro)

This is ultimately a missed opportunity. The format is similar to Dot Wordsworth's 'Mind Your Language' column in the Spectator, where some interesting lexical facts are spun around a given head-word. But Susie Dent lacks Wordsworth's wry, authoritative erudition. While there are some entertaining moments, these are outweighed by the book's snide tone and poor choice of words. The English language contains an abundance of beautiful words, drawn from many different ancient langauges; it is poorly served by this selection of neologisms and obscenities.… (altro)