Daniel Menaker (1941–2020)

If you enjoy language and its use and abuse you will love this book. Chiefly the author takes expressions and shows how they are misused by the public. For instance - whet you appetite and wet your appetite. Mr. Menaker documents where he located the language abuse. He also has a wealth of information on the historical derivations of a vast array of words. These books are complimented by illustrations by Roz Chast that poke fun at these abuses. He does get bogged down with a little too much detail every now and then. Overall I learned a lot and enjoyed the book.… (mehr)

Back-cover blurbs that proclaim a book to be "hilarious" and "full of howlers" are setting themselves up for trouble, in case the contents fail to deliver. Sadly, this was true in my experience. Each example of a "svelte" (the author's term for an ingenious misspelling) is accompanied by explanatory text that doesn't provide much of an explanation for how the misspelling arose. Some semblance of flow is attempted by ending each explanation with a segue to the next "svelte", but these segues are often torturous and convoluted, and the formatting of the book often has the next segue following after two (and occasionally more) pages of white space, endpapers and/or illustrations. The illustrations themselves, by Roz Chast, are good, but the rest of the content isn't really worth your time.… (mehr)