I'm Leaving You Simon, You Disgust Me: A Dictionary of Received Ideas

Donaldson, William

ISBN 10: 0304365750 / ISBN 13: 9780304365753

Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003

About this Item

Fine copy in Near Fine, unclipped dj.first edition signed and dated by the author to the title page. Seller Inventory # 003961

Bibliographic Details

Title: I'm Leaving You Simon, You Disgust Me: A ...

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Publication Date: 2003

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Fine

Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine

Signed: Signed by Author(s)

Edition: 1st Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

Spoken and written language is littered with clichés, but there are some usages - smug statements of secondhand opinion, grating nuggets of folk wisdom, toe-curling verbal flourishes of the would-be authoritative - that go beyond the bounds of cliché to enter more desperate linguistic territory. We encounter these verbal horrors every day of our lives - in conversations overheard on tube, train and bus and at suburban dinner parties, in the fictional dialogues of TV drama - and even in the glib formulations of TV sports commentators. They are disparate in nature - but have one thing in common: they all represent desperate attempts on the part of the speaker to persuade the listener that certainty of language mirrors certainty of thought and intellect, to project a verbal front of decidedness, authority and knowledge.

Willie Donaldson has turned his finely tuned satirical ear to these verbal inanities to create a unique, offbeat and entirely hilarious dictionary of cringemaking Islingtonian phrasemaking. But the twist is this: lurking behind the A-Z façade is a dramatis personae of gabbling middle-class archetypes, including the Simon of the title - a Canonbury-based wine importer - and his overwrought partner, Susan, a university academic. Their excruciating dialogues - conversational nightmares of pat phrases, glib opinion and conjugal bitchiness played out in the fictional context of a Barnsbury tapas bar named the Goya - are brilliantly captured by the author, and make this most individual of books a candidate for humour title of the year.

Review:

buy the book for all your friends and relatives this Christmas..... it's frighteningly accurate in its summary of middlebrow cultural truisms.... and, in that characteristically bone-dry Donaldson manner, very, very funny. (James Delingpole THE SPECTATOR)

his latest tome, like a very decent Australian Shiraz, really knocks your socks off.... in this wonderful book, William Donaldson has assembled the most comprehensive collection of cliches, affectations and dinner-party vacuities that you could possibly dream of. (Oliver Pritchett SUNDAY TELEGRAPH)

dreaming up a cast of Islington insufferables to illustrate his definitions is a good wheeze (Catherine Shoard THE EVENING STANDARD)