Anguished English: An Anthology of Accidental Assaults Upon Our Language | Richard Lederer

Anguished English: An Anthology of Accidental Assaults Upon Our Language | Richard Lederer | Hilarious

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Anguished English:...

	Anguished English: An Anthology of Accidental Assaults Upon Our Language Richard Lederer Dell, 1989 - 192 pages average customer review:based on 28 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Anguished English is the impossibly funny anthology of accidental assaults upon our language. From bloopers and blunders to Signs of the Times to Mixed Up Metaphors...from Two-Headed Headlines to Mangling Modifiers, here is an outrageous treasury of assaults upon our common language that will leave you roaring with delight and laughter.

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This book contains headlines, malapropisms, school essays, parental notes to teachers, lawyer-witness dialogues, signs and other assaults on the English language that provide hours of chuckles and retelling to those who have not read it.

When you read a want ad that says: "Mixing bowl set designed to please a cook with round bottom for efficient beating," or the headline "Stiff Opposition Expected to Casketless Funeral Plan," you have to laugh.

It also reminds me of what a boss once told me: You can always deny what you said; you can never deny what you wrote.

This book is "overpriced, and worth every penny of it."

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Hilarious

My mom has had this book for years, and it is no wonder she never got rid of it even though it is now brutally beaten up. Organized into sections, the bloopers people have made in essays, signs, even newspapers are worth buying this book for because of how shockingly hilarious they can be. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is fluent in English and has even a little sense of humor. It will keep you entertained for a long tme.

Have A Good Laugh!

This book was recommende to my daughter by a college professor in 1990. I bought it at the time and read it lying down. I laughed so hard, I had to sit up... I have bought several copies since then as gifts, as I did this latest one. I lecture on the Healing Power Of Humor, and use lines form this book. It is a book you do not have to read from cover to cover in order, you can simply open a page and have a good laugh any time.

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The original book of literary humor

This book made me laugh non-stop for two hours. Then it made my wife laugh for two hours, and then my Dad. All just by showing what a little malformed grammar, minor misspelling, or incorrect use of punctuation can do to a sentence.

An english lesson and hysterical read all at the same time.

Sometimes anguishing, somtimes funny

As a compendium of humorous ways that people misuse the English language, "Anguished English" is comprehensive, if not superb. Lederer treats various categories of language errors - bloopers, mixed metaphors, mistranslations , etc. - in separate chapters. "The World According to Student Bloopers" -- a running history of the world allegedly taken from real student written responses -- is often hilarious. Who knew that King Solomon had 300 wives and 700 porcupines, or that Sir Francis Drake *circumcised* the world with a 100-foot clipper? I also enjoyed the chapter on two-headed headlines, some of which took some work to uncover their second meaning. "IKE SAYS NIXON CAN'T STAND PAT" is fairly obvious, but "CARTER PLANS SWELL DEFICIT" took a second or two to puzzle out.

The biggest drawback to the book is that other than or Lederer's short and sometimes forced introductions to each chapter, the book is basically a series of lists, ordered by topic, with no indication of source. Though written in 1978 before the Internet truly got underway, the book often resembles the annoying "funny" e-mails that circulate today on the web. In Lederer's defense, I suspect that some of today's e-mails are actually rip-off's of "Anguished English." But it would have added to his efforts if he had described the process of accumulating his trove of malapropisms, informing us about the source, rather than just laying them out, naked on the ice, as it were. That would have given the reader a bit more to chew on than the warmed over fare offered here, some of which seem too perfect to be true. For instance, it's hard to believe that the journalist who wrote, "IS THERE A RING OF DEBRIS AROUND URANUS?" didn't know exactly what he/she was doing. Yet this headline is offered as an unintentional mistake.

For all its faults and excesses, "Anguished English" is fun and sometimes interesting. Consider it a good buy for a young person interested in learning the subtleties of the English language by studying its misuse

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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