Based on this article, I just ordered Crazy English from Amazon. I love word-play and this book sounds like fun.

Crazy English, Richard Lederer

Humorous writing that is based on a clever use of words is a favorite of mine. IMO, the author Peter DeVries is the best. (I think he has gone to the great bibliotheca in the sky). Where else could I have learned the difference between flout and flaunt, the difference between gourmet and gourmand and the differnce between estivate and hibernate all the while choking with laughter. Two of the De Vries books that I most enjoyed were Slouching Towards Kalamazoo and Forever Panting. DeVries is serious as well as funny and often combines the two, never more-so than when reflecting on his strict Calvinist upbringing. Here is the NY Times on DeVries--

“I would rate Peter DeVries the funniest serious writer to be found either side of the Atlantic. I have heard the complaint that he is really too funny, that there is no respite from the constant din of firecrackers. . . DeVries would probably disavow the slightest pretension, but the fizzing hilarities of Tunnel of Love and Comfort Me With Apples are aimed in deadly earnest. Affectation and irresponsibility, self-dramatization and self pity are his targets, and the gaiety of the whole performance evinces a rare skill and integrity. This is what the satirist works toward and seldom achieves.”—New York Times Review.

Another wordmaster is Stanley Elkin. Elkin is often too complicated and dark for me but I do recommend a book of three novellas Van Gogh's Room at Arles. Elkin was a hero of mine because he kept creating until his death from MS at age 65. The first novella in Van Gogh's Room is called Her Sense of Timing. It is one of the few times he wrote about MS and it is 100 pages of dark hilarity.

I'd be interested in hearing what anyone else is reading.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`

Everyday is punderful for a verbivore

Monday, February 5, 2001

By JON HAHN

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER

An amazing man Richard Lederer is, As author and speaker and linguistic whiz, Who uses our language like artists use paint, Till a word, like a horse, is the color it ain't A student of language and teacher of same, He's oxymoronic at any word game, And you sense in his speaking he's having great fun When he's tweaking your mind with a homograph pun. -- A. Nonny Muss, Seattle

Anyone who knows that arachibutyrophobia means the fear of getting peanut butter stuck on the roof of your mouth is all right in my book. But then, I happened to have a copy of "Crazy English -- The Ultimate Joy Ride Through Our Language" by Richard Lederer (Pocket Books, 189 delightful pages, $16.95).

And wordsmith Lederer reigned in Seattle awhile earlier this week, doing hat-trick appearances at Lakeside Middle School as well as with a well-heeled adult audience atop Columbia Center. Both appearances -- one is tempted to call them performances for their entertainment -- were sponsored by the Northern Trust Bank.

I chose to audit the first of his several Lakeside appearances and came away feeling I'd been shortchanged in my Chicago Public Schools education. If someone like a Richard Lederer had spoken to my fifth-grade class -- and given us free copies of a fun-with-language book, compliments of Northern Trust -- the reading and writing disciplines might not have seemed so ... disciplined, or daunting.

Lederer wears the robes of Royal Verbivore to the Queen's English, the minister with many folios and many ways of shedding light into the black holes of spelling, grammar and syntax. But for all his many delightful books on words, he admitted to Lakeside fifth-graders: "I stink at dialogue, creating characters and plot development. I am a Writer of Information."

Which is way too modest a conceit for a fellow so highly regarded not only for his dozens, nay, thousands of papers and articles, and dozens of books on language. With his Ph.D. and long tenure as a teacher at a New Hampshire boarding school behind him, Lederer has evolved into a money-making author and speaker and National Public Radio commentator and English language usage editor for Random House publishers and all that. One of his first language-blooper books, "Anguished English," has sold more than 1 million copies and he now has a sequel: "The Bride of Anguished English."

Who'd have thunk he was a bookish guy after watching his almost vaudevillian performance for the fifth-graders at Lakeside. This 6-foot-something fellow swayed and bounced and dashed sideways, his long arms windmilling about. A doctoral-level English prof pulling his nose up and to the side as he told a pair of Quasimodo-looking- for-a-substitute-bell-ringer jokes that had ding and dong homographic punch lines.

(Long story, short: First man has no arms, but tells Quasimodo he can ring the Notre Dame bells by crashing his head into them. He does just that, producing a credible "Gong!" but the bell swings back, knocking him to his death in courtyard below. Cops ask Quasimodo if he knows the fellow and he responds: "No, but his face sure rings a bell." After some giggles and groans, comes the second Lederer story about the dead man's younger brother who, although also armless, claims he not only can ring bell by head-bashing, but is younger and thus, can sidestep the back-swinging bell. He also does well for three days but comes to work drunk, rings the bell and in his stupor is unable to sidestep the back-swing and meets the same ding-dong fate as his late brother. When the gendarmes ask Quasimodo if he knows this dead man, the hunchback responds: "I don't know his name, but he's a dead ringer for his brother!")

And when the fifth-graders respond with "Oh!" and "Ahh!," Lederer quickly notes: "You see, that is what learning is." They had grasped the double-meaning of certain words and thus learned something about the quirkiness of our mother tongue. "Our language is a funny thing," he said, "which is why we say that 'feet smell' and 'noses run.'"

Then he shows them drawings done by other fifth-graders to illustrate stock phrases, such as "smells to high heaven" and "button your lip" and "time flies." All these oddities of the English language are presented in Lederer's amusing and unique style in the 15 or so books he's written on everything from bloopers to word games, grammar advice, writing and his love of the language. And this fellow who writes daily -- most every morning in the study, just steps away from his bedroom -- obviously has had a lifelong love affair with our language.

"I've also just written my first two crossword puzzles, a children's book and I'm also getting into writing e-books," he said.

"Do you just think this stuff up?" asked a somewhat incredulous fifth-grader. "I don't have to," Lederer replied, "It's all around us." Which prompts him into a quick delivery of several more punny lines and then he allows as how this odd talent "gets me invited to a lot of parties ... but only once."

As for his prolific writing, his word books have not always been hot-off-the-press success stories. "Writers have to learn to live with rejection," he advised the students. "One of my books was rejected 21 times before it was published."

Lederer and his books and articles are now very much in demand, and he makes periodic junkets across the land from his newly adopted home in San Diego. But he demands more from himself than does his public, and it's nice to meet a successful writer who can be comfortable in his niche at the top and still come out and play in the real world.

"Writing," he advises his young audience, "is a profession that no one would give up on purpose."

In a serious moment near the end of "Crazy English," Lederer proffers some of what he considers "the most luminous lines in English poetry," including Alfred, Lord Tennyson's:

"The moan of doves in immemorial elms,

And murmuring of innumerable bees."

And then he notes: "Sound and meaning work their dual magic upon us in ways that ear and mind alone cannot always analyze. Consider, for example, the foreign couple who decided to name their first daughter with the most beautiful English word they had ever heard.

"They named the child Diarrhea."

Jon Hahn is a staff columnist who writes three times a week in the P-I. He can be reached at 206-448-8317 or e-mail him at jonhahn@seattle-pi.com Richard Lederer's books and other information are available on his Web site: www.pobox.com/~verbivore or by writing to him at: 9974 Scripps Ranch Blvd., No. 201, San Diego, CA 92131.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), February 05, 2001

Answers

Anyone reading some good books? Fiction or nonfiction, funny or serious.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), February 06, 2001.

(hanging head in shame....) I haven't the time to read these days. It's one of the reasons I miss the subways in NYC -- perfect reading time.

Too lazy to look it up, but did Richard Lederer write a book entitled, Get Thee to a Punnery? It is absolutely one of the funniest books I've ever read.

(If I can find it -- I know I saved it -- I have one of the funniest puns I've ever read. I'll post it later.)

-- (PatriciaS@lasvegas.com), February 06, 2001.

Lars, In the past few weeks I've read a few good ones,

"CURRAHEE! A screaming Eagle at Normandy" - by Donald Burgett

Excellent story of the 101st Airborne invasion of France at D-Day from a man who was there, gritty, bloody, and tough to put down.

"False Memory" - by Dean Koontz

If you enjoy Koontz you will like this one too.

"Hot Springs" - by Stephen Hunter

More tales of the Swagger family, set in 1946 Hot Springs Ar. Right up there with his other books.

"The Mighty Eighth, the air war in Europe as told by the men who fought it" - by Gerald Astor

Another compelling first hand history account.

And in the batter's box right now is "Post Captain" by Patrick O'Brian. I'll let you know how it is.

-- Uncle Deedah (unkeed@yahoo.com), February 06, 2001.

I'm reading the Dune series. I never read any books after the original, there are five, and now I'm doing that.

Compared to the original book, they aren't that great, but compared to the rest of science fiction, they're pretty good.

Speaking of science fiction, has anyone out there read Macroscope, by Piers Anthony? I try to tell people that this is the best Sci Fi novel ever written, but they look at me like I'm crazy.

-- Bemused (and_amazed@you.people), February 06, 2001.