clew's reviews: a book log

Junk English, Ken Smith

Mockery is a thin meal, even when one mocks the deserving. Junk English has typography like Fowler's Modern English Usage, but lacks the confidence, or was not given the room, to describe solid as well as junk English. A whole book (though short) of examples of terrible usage is a nauseating diet. Some of the cute names for classes of bad use are too cute to be useful; "People Reduction", to point out that we now read of consumers instead of people.

Some of them are funny, though: "Lack of Will", for advertising's not-actually-claims. (This is a joke about the idion as well as the meaning, unlike "People Reduction".)

If I regard this book as a extra-cranky appendix to Fowler it's a much better book. It does have some corrections to its terrible examples, and besides, it's not fair to expect anything else to be Fowler.

It could be the right book to leave suggestively around the office copier. The cover is bright orange and practically anyone might leaf through it while fiddling with a paperclip. I wonder what perpetrators of terrible prose think while they're writing it - would they recognize their errors? So wrote clew in Philosophy.