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

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. ( )

Great, amusing, and educational: what more could you possibly want? ( )

This is a delightful book defining words that are seldom used; words with subtle and powerful connotations that add richness to our world. Read it at your leisure. Pick a word out here and there and enjoy Gordon’s amusing examples of how a word is used. There are two levels to this book. Level one is the dictionary with entries consisting of the word, a brief definition, and an example of the word in use. In the second level--Gordon has created an imaginary world of divas and dandies to provide the context of the words being used. The examples of the word being defined in use provide a glimpse into this imaginary world of seraglios and marzipan. Lots of fun. Amusing Victorian-era illustrations decorate the text. ( )