Words Fail Me - Hardcover

Monachino, Teresa

4.13

150 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 071484635X ISBN 13: 9780714846354

Publisher: Phaidon Press, 2006

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Witty and amusing handbook to the contradictions and inconsistencies of the English language. In 2004, Lynne Truss' little book on punctuation, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, was a surprise hit. The Sudoku craze swept the country in 2005. This year, why not challenge your brain with words instead of numbers? WORDS FAIL ME by Teresa Monachino, is a collection of mind-teasing wordplay designed to artfully manipulate the unpredictability of the English language. Award-winning designer and typographer Teresa Monachino has always been baffled by the English language's contradictions and peculiarities. Words do not mean what they say--the middle letters of believe spell lie. Words have the same spelling but differ in both pronunciation and meaning--minute is both miniscule and a measurement of time. Words are paired together redundantly--empty space or honest truth. WORDS FAIL ME is a witty collection of these unruly words, all set in Monachino's immaculate ...

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Review:

"A book that gently subverts and questions the art of expression... Filled with gentle humour and genuinely interesting anachronisms of the English language, all set in Monachino's immaculate typography."―Design Week

Synopsis:

This lively and informative new title was originally inspired by the author's Italian mother and her struggles with the vagaries of the English language. Over the years the author has tried to correct her attempts and explain why the word she has chosen is incorrect, only to be baffled herself by the lack of logic within those explanations. English is full of contradictions and peculiarities (not counting such dull grammatical inconsistencies as 'i before e except after c', which are really no fun at all) and hoodwinks us into believing one thing while meaning something quite different. In English, all is not what it seems and with this book the author has brought these illogical oddities to the fore. Questions of spelling, pronunciation or the blatantly nonsensical are illustrated through clever visual representations that are created entirely through artfully manipulated typography.

This playful and sometimes hilarious text sorts the homonyms from the heteronyms and introduces the 'antigram' (demonstrating how the swift shuffle of certain letters can create words that entirely contradict the first: honestly becomes on the sly, earliest becomes rise late and, fabulously, Elvis = lives!). Monachino goes on to demand an explanation from all those tricky little words that are spelt the same and pronounced the same, but yet have utterly different meanings, while highlighting a few of life's petty pleonasms and showing off some quite excellent tautologies. A gaggle of one-word oxymorons shines the spotlight on words that harbour contradictory words within them and the final section provides a note on inadvisable hyphenation, which is a useful disco-very, but perhaps not the best place to beg-in. Because of the linguistic nature of this title there will be a American English edition.

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