Karen Elizabeth GordonCritiques

Over the years Karen Elizabeth Gordon's brand of cuteness has worn out its welcome with me. I say this as someone who once owned all her books and touted her to others (and, indeed, used The Deluxe Transitive Vampire as the basis of instructional materials I developed to aid high schoolers with low rates of literacy). This book may well, in my relatively extensive experience with grammar and style manuals and lexicons, be a nadir for not only the genre, but for Ms. Gordon as well.

I write this as I look at her entry in this book for the words affect and effect; I submit that if you didn't already have a relatively firm grasp of the problems in usage related to these two words, this book would be of no help to you. Ms. Gordon's exemplar for the use of these words reads: "Startling Glower once dragged onto the show 'Up Your Eponym' a collection of pop psychologists (mincing to their places and sporting moles and affectations, all powdered and dressed up in Restoration frippery to pander to Glower's sartorial and aesthetic proclivities) who discussed 'the affect of an abused sibling, crying into her mother's soup' or 'a Lothario who was utterly destitute of affect, but handsomely rich in beaux gestes and looks.'" N.B. that she neglects, in this precious prose, to offer an example of affect in its use as a verb.

If a person looking for a clear exposition of these words, who lacked any understanding of their use and their places in the taxonomy of the parts of speech, came to these pages, I am hard pressed to see how this entry (page 4, incidentally) would elucidate the use of these words. And this problem repeats throughout this book, making it almost useless for those toward whom I would think such a book would be aimed.

In other words, this is basically a useless tome that is arguably a reflection of its author's vanity.

Very fun! Clarified a few things for me and expanded my awareness quite a bit. Now it's time to take a few choice paragraphs and deconstruct them with this book as a guide.

The author begins by explaining: "This is a book of sentences: sentences about sentences, and sentences sentencing themselves." She continues, "Part of the art of creating a sentence is knowing the substance and elements of which it is composed." In the following chapters, she ten explains nouns, verbs, verbals, adjectives and adverbs, pronouns, agreement in tense, prhases, clauses, fragments, and comma usage. Her selection of sentences for examples is entertaining, but it is probably not a book that could be used below the high school level because of the often risqué nature of the humor.½

Good writing generally means clear meaning, which is immeasurably enhanced by good punctuation. This pithy and entertaining book uses examples - many of them humourous - to delineate guidelines for using periods, question marks, exclamation points (so overused!), the comma, the semicolon, the colon, the hyphen, the dash, quotation marks, this punctuation mark it is misused in practice more than others.½

I'm generally reliable as a proofreader for fixing common mistakes in grammar, spelling, punctuation: good enough for home and work. I've long known that true copyediting would take another level of expertise, though, and occasionally pick up a book to make a few steps forward in that respect. Typically, this casual approach doesn't help much: I still get tangled on the finer points of that versus which, for example -- a perennial bugbear of mine. Having read Gordon's Transitive Vampire, I still can't recall the more obscure branches or leaves on the grammar tree. No single book is likely to replace the need for simply buckling down and committing rules to memory. Should I want to look something up, though, Gordon's survey is simple and offers unusual imagery. I'll keep it near my desk alongside Strunk & White.

When clarity is paramount, I can get behind such guidance as, Equal in grammatical horror to the sentence fragment is the comma splice [111] and Avoid what are called "squinting modifiers". [129]. And yet, many a poet and Tin Pan Alley rhymester will rue the possibilities foreclosed, should either rule be followed blindly. Clarity and concision are not the only worthy uses of language.

The clip art is fun, the examples amusing. Neither builds to a narrative or even an outline of one, but Gordon relies on a few common themes to suggest a certain milieu: suggestive appetites, supernatural happenings, and the ennui of the aristocracy. It's all very Edward Gorey.

Loved because it sticks.

NA

A clever, witty, and enjoyable (!) book about grammar, syntax, and the written word. It is full of useful examples and descriptions of grammatical constructs. This book is more enjoyable and easier to use than Strunk and White in my opinion, while also providing the same information. Anyone who wants to improve their writing ability and reading skills would benefit from reading this book.½

Lovely, hilarious. If only some of the places in this book were real...!

An amusing romp through the bizarre and dark corners of the rare sections of the English lexicon.

Every teacher should have this little book.

This grammar guide's quirky gimmick is that the example sentences are all dark and supernatural-themed, Victorian-flavored, vaguely erotic, or just plain weird. (E.g., "To nuzzle flagpoles is her secret desire," "If I die first, will you tuck me into my casket?" and "The werewolf had a toothache.") This is at least more interesting than the standard "John gave the ball to Mary" stuff, but it didn't necessarily work all that well for me. If anything, it's kind of distracting, and it doesn't make up for the fact that the grammar lessons themselves are very dry and focused more on providing names for all the possible parts of a sentence than on teaching you how to use them well. Plus, unsurprisingly, there are points upon which it gets overly pedantic. There are definitely better, and livelier, grammar guides out there. Still, it'll be worth hanging on to in case I need to quickly look up the difference between a participle and a gerund, or if I ever meet a Goth in need of grammar lessons.

My new grammar read. The grammar lessons are witty and helpful, but the vampire persona who writes the chapter intros doesn't quite work for me.

I enjoyed the concept of this better than the execution. It straddles the line between text book and humor, but doesn't do it very well. Other reviewers have already phrased it particularly well. I think that this could work for a high school audience in some cases, but not as a general-use textbook. I really wanted to enjoy this, but it became much more of a slog to actually enjoy it.

I bought this book thinking it might be a fun way for my 11-year old daughter, who is beginning home schooling this year, to learn grammar. She has been reading since she was four and she writes wonderfully, but it can't hurt to understand how the various forms of punctuation work. I read this book myself to see if it would be suitable. I'm not completely sure; the author has a lot of fun with a few sentences that definitely have some adult meanings, although I'm not sure an 11-year old could tell. What was most surprising was that the author's sense of humor and deliberate strangeness didn't get old after a while. Amazingly it held up throughout the book and I found myself smiling or nodding in appreciation of a clever or amusing sentence quite a few times. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of what a grammar book written by Edward Gorey might have been like.

I also can't argue with her rules for punctuation. There are maybe one or two places I think a comma would suffice in place of a semicolon--but I could be wrong. I'll probably pass this one on to my daughter later in the year after she has gone through a more conventional grammar book. Given that she finished reading all of Jane Austen when she was 8, I guess she can handle this.

This is a great book! Although it us a pretty thorough text about grammar, it is dressed in so much hilarity and freshness that it is pleasurable to read. I was surprised by the fact that it was published in 1984, as there is nothing about it that feels dated. I appreciate the pictures that are dispersed throughout the book as well; they are very enjoyably creepy. I recommend this book for middle school students all the way up to adulthood. For those who struggle with learning grammar, the light humor should make it more bearable for you

Grammar. That most hated of subjects - you either get it, or don't. Luckily, this book explains grammar using humorous sentences that both explain, and keeps a reader interested. And... its short. Which is always helpful. I especially love the illustrations. This is the first grammar book that I think I would actually want to use. I think I will start giving this book to high school graduates. It seems more useful than that Dr. Seuss book everyone gets!

(Shelf-Clearing Project Reference Book). A charming and exhaustive guide to punctuation, illustrated with amusing sentences and archival black-and-white pictures. Ms. Gordon endorses the Oxford Comma, so this one is definitely a keeper.

This isn’t a book you read from cover to cover. I picked it up from time to time over a few years. And what a pleasure to pick up it was—its deep red cloth cover, its heavy pages with rounded corners, its ornate endpapers, its lovely typography and period illustrations throughout in antique ink colors. The target market is the utterly impractical tourist, anyone fascinated by obscure symbols, absurd ideas, strange quotations, and clever wordplay. Amusement, not significance, was foremost in the production of this book.

My only beef is that such an arch-literate misguidebook, deriving most of its humor from scintillating jeux de mots, should stoop so low as to translate nearly every French phrase. Presumably anyone reading this book would have enough basic knowledge of France (not to mention common sense) to know that “artisans” means “craftspeople” and that the “entrée” in France is the first course. Humor is destroyed when it is explained, and the reader finds herself unnecessarily patronized.

Still, this annoyance can be overlooked in the mischievous romp through a Paris of fantasy, where the Hôtel Hélas hands out handkerchiefs with the room key and provides waterproof pens, and where you can choose between the Métro Marquis de Sade with its spiked seats or the Auto da Fée taxi service to convey you from the Folies Berbères nightclub to the Parc les Chênes Andalous.

I was recommended this book by a mom of one of my middle school students last year. She told my about this book at the beginning of the year, and I finally ordered it for myself months later from Maple Street Book Shop. Although I never found a chance to share the gothic, satirical sentences and examples with my middle school class (I didn't feel comfortable because of their age and the school's Catholic conservative atmosphere), I enjoyed sharing these examples and with my boyfriend and my friends, especially those friends as nerdy about grammar as I am.

The cover and title of the book is a bit misleading, but as soon as you turn to the contents page, you know instantly that this book is in fact a GRAMMAR book! Please check this out, buy it, or leaf through the pages! If you have any sense of satire, a gothic bone in your body, or love New Orleans for the ghosts, goblins, and spirits that loom over the city, you will love this book! I plan on sharing this book with my high school-aged students in reminding them about basic grammar rules that they long forgotten over those humid and heavy summer days.

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Book Report: The book description says:
"What on earth does lagniappe mean? A sluggard who lies around till noon? A she-wolf of Anapurna? A car that demands heavy pampering?" In fact, none of the above. But one can find this Creole French word delectably defined in THE DISHEVELED DICTIONARY, which does for vocabulary what Gordon's cult classic THE WELL-TEMPERED SENTENCE did for punctuation and THE TRANSITIVE VAMPIRE did for grammar.

THE DISHEVELED DICTIONARY takes a voluptuary's approach to language, offering a lavish feast of words and their multiple uses. Favorite characters from Gordon's earlier books appear in cameo, including Yolanta, Jonquil Mapp, cowboys with lingerie, and assorted royal riffraff. With her trademark cache of illustrations and flamboyantly gothic examples, Gordon takes readers on a hedonist's tour of the world of words, where they can check into the Last Judgment Pinball Machine Motel, slip into susurrant silk pajamas at Cafe Frangipane, or plunge into scenes from such literary works as Torpor in the Swing,The Wretch of Lugubria, and Gossamer and the Green Light.

Laced with erudite insights and eccentric wit, THE DISHEVELED DICTIONARY is about the music of speech and the sound and sensuality of language, celebrating not only the obsure but also our most beloved and basic words.

My Review: I read this because Stephen-from-Ohio read it, so I could prove the point that I do NOT hate every book he loves. I was right, I don't hate this book, not at all. I like Gordon's funny, illustrative story snippets and I like the wide net she casts to bring us cool words. In fact, two of my all-time top-ten fave-rave words appear, with amusante little vignettes, on the same page: louche (disreputable, shady, dubious) and lubricious (sexually aroused or obsessed).

The wonderful thing about such books, the browser's dictionaries, is the delight they afford the wordnik. I am unquestionably an enthusiastic wordnik, a complete grinning fool when it comes to English's unrepentant pillaging of other languages' treasuries of words for its own enrichment. I adore that facet of the Anglophone mindset that says, “ooo shiny little trinket gimme gimme” and adds thereby a shade of meaning to its already immense, lustrous, gorgeously hued pile of drachenfutter that is the vocabulary you and I can draw on. “Start” isn't the same as “commence” which isn't exactly “begin,” though they're all in the same family. Shades of meaning make language so much more fun to use and to examine. I love the little books that help me do this.

See? See?! I liked a book you did, Stephen-from-Ohio! And liked it a lot! Thanks for showing it to me.

If I may unbosom my burden, I must confess I am not much of a wordy. Not a word aficionado by any length, I have always been laconic by nature. However, being a reader, I naturally have developed an internal dictionary of sorts and only on rare occasions do I come across an unfamiliar word, but being the quite, untalkative person that I am they are just not in my repertoire of everyday speech.

Nonetheless, The Disheveled Dictionary is a very fun read. It defines a number of words that either obscure or just fun to say, and provides a sentence/paragraph that uses the word and is usually clever, hilarious, or beautiful, and often all 3 at once, like elegant susurrations of a flummerous nature. She also tends to reuse many of the words in other words' examples, so after you've learned it you might see it pop up again, which does a great job of getting it to 'stick' better in your memory.

It's understandable that some of these words are uncommon, simply because they are unpleasant to say. I will never say calumniate aloud, nor will I ever choose to say ineluctable over the much prettier inevitable. I also would but roll my eyes at anyone who said they took a perambulation, instead of a walk or a stroll.

One can also learn a lot about oneself by perusing these pages. I, for example, have learned that I probably wamble, that I am a troglodyte and chasmophile, and that I'm ingenuous, among other things. I can say that I never want to find myself in an oubliette, although if ever I ran into a sedulous simulacrum of my 14-year-old self I would totally dump him in one. So you see, these are very important things to know!

I enjoyed reading the book. Really, it was a lot more fun than reading an actual dictionary, and I don’t even care if the author voluntarily chooses to live in California and Paris.

A witty, yet dark approach to exploring grammatical issues like parts of speech and verbals, this text demystifies common grammar problems through explanation, examples, and some illustration. In my classroom, I could use this book as a grammar reference text for my students. It would allow them to explore their grammar issues in a more meaningful way than a grammar workbook.½

The Transitive Vampire: A handbook of grammar for the innocent, the eager and the doomed looked as if it would appeal to me. It was immediately obvious that the writer of the book has a sense of humor. I was eager to read a book about a serious topic that had been written in a less-than-serious manner.

The book is filled with example sentences. The example sentences are filled with nonsensical scenarios. "She was kicked by the soft shoe of destiny, and she landed in Wales." That sentence is to exemplify the proper use of an independent clause.

Here is a sentence that is given as an example for correcting the use of sentence fragments: "Sometimes bras and panties would cry out to her to touch them as she navigated her way through the boutique."

Here is one of my favorite examples, also illustrating the avoidance of sentence fragments: "Tripping over the ripped linoleum, she was floored."

While the sentence examples are quite clever and witty I have to say that I was left with more questions than answers. The author gives examples that are incorrect and then makes appropriate corrections. I found myself wanting greater detail in her explanations of clauses and such. I read the book with a cursory interest but I did not come away from it smarter than before I read it. Pity, that.

I also expected something quite different from the book and am very dismayed that I found it not to be as I had suspected it would be. Upon picking it up and glancing through it I thought the example sentences were, themselves, going to tell their own creative story. I am sorry to say that wasn't the case. My expectations were not met by this book.½

This is the kind of book the coolest of cool professors would use in a writing class. The language is hip and humorous, the illustrations funny and fabulous. While Gordon lays down the law about when and where to use an exclamation point, a period, a comma, or semi colon, I don't feel obligated to follow her to the letter (or period). I read The New Well-Tempered Sentence as merely suggestion; here's what you can do, if you so chose (and obviously I don't). Think Edward Estlin Cummings. Gordon is careful to use witty examples and whimsical illustrations to prove her points to go along with that hip and cool vibe. This is the essential reference book you have on your shelf and because it is so funky you are not ashamed to have it in plain sight.½