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Dictionary of Humorous Quotations

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memorable quips, bon mots, ripostes, and one-liners

There are subtle shades of distinction to be made between a saying which is funny, humorous, or witty. Funny makes you laugh, humorous produces what someone called ‘a smile in the mind’, and witty is usually associated with a rapid intellectual riposte – a nimbleness of mind. Ned Sherrin is right to call his compilation ‘humorous’. It’s probably best to ration yourself to a few pages now and again – otherwise they all tend to blend into a sort of verbal soup. But I must say I’m a sucker for these compendiums, and I couldn’t stop myself reading this one through from start to finish. It reflects Sherrin’s theatrical bent that he includes so many quotes and bon mots from the stage and its authors. Lots of Noel Coward, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, and as a wonderful camp lyricist, Cole Porter comes out well too.

Dictionary of Humorous QuotationsMae West is as quotable as ever. Commenting on the possible choice of a leading man, she observes: “Let’s forget about the six feet and talk about the seven inches”. [I learned recently that she used to work very hard writing and honing these one-liners.] Dorothy Parker is good too: “If all the girls attending the prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

There are also a lot of entries from song lyricists, which makes you appreciate someone like Ira Gershwin even more when you realise that he wrote the music as well as the words to But Not for Me

With love to lead the way,
I’ve found more clouds of grey
Than any Russian play
Could guarantee . . .
. . . When ev’ry happy plot
Ends with the marriage knot –
And there’s no knot for me.

There are also random gems, such as this, attributed to Dick Vosburgh: “I haven’t been so happy since the day that Reader’s Digest lost my address”. And some come anonymously out of the side field, as in “Death is nature’s way of telling you to slow down”.

There are even gnomic contributions from scientists – such as Werner Von Braun’s “Basic research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.” And I even have a sneaky admiration for George Best’s self-defense: “People say I wasted my money. I say 90 per cent went on women, fast cars, and booze. The rest I wasted.”

I didn’t realise that the expression “A camel is a horse designed by a committee” is attributed to Alex Issigonis, the Greek-born designer of the Mini – nor that the expression “The lunatics are taking over the asylum” was occasioned by the takeover of the United Artists film production company by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith.

Devotees of UK radio and TV programmes will be interested to know that there’s a whole section on catchphrases – from Mrs Mopp’s “Can I do you now, sir?” [ITMA] to “You might well think that. I couldn’t possibly comment” from House of Cards.

P.J. O’Rourke is on good form throughout the compilation, and for someone who is essentially regarded as a right-wing commentator, he can be surprisingly radical:

Wherever there is suffering, injustice and oppression, the Americans will show up, six months late, and bomb the country next to where it’s happening.

This might have been written with ironic intent, but it doesn’t strike me as being really humorous – because it is so chillingly close to the truth.

On ‘Pride’, I was glad to see that Jeanette Winterson’s self-estimation was being kept alive as a deterrent to others. She was asked to name the best living author writing in English.

No one working in the English language now comes close to my exuberance, my passion, my fidelity to words.

Not funny – not even humorous – but bracing as an example of hubris.

It’s superbly browsable, but as the nearly 5,000 quotations are grouped by more than 100 themes, it’s also a reference with practical applications.

The entries run from Acting and Advertising to Writing and Youth. Then there’s an index of authors and the topics whereon they have written. And if that’s not enough, there’s also a keyword index – so there’s no shortage of routes to what you might be looking for.

John Paul Getty’s formula for success: “Rise early. Work late. Strike oil.”

© Roy Johnson 2009

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Ned Sherrin (ed), Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 4th edition, 2009, pp.560, ISBN: 019957006X

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Dictionary of Literary Quotations

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famous writers – on literature, authorship, and life

This Dictionary of Literary Quotations is a new and expanded edition of an acclaimed collection of over 4,400 quotations – by writers, about writers, about books and literature, and about a huge range of other related issues. The quotations on any topic are listed by date, so you can trace what writers have said about drink and drugs (for instance) from Horace in 65BC to J.C. Ballard in 1990. To locate any item, there’s a table of themes and a list of key words at the back of the book.

Dictionary of Literary Quotations Editor Peter Kemp also includes a list of authors (Ackroyd to Zola) and a key word index (abandoned to zombies) to track down what you’re looking for. But the most interesting thing is the double system of entries in the main body of the book. These include listings by writer – so you can look up what Flaubert or William Faulkner said of note on fame or earning a living – but there are also listings of what writers have said about each other.

And it’s not always complimentary. Katherine Mansfield opines that “E.M.Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot” and D.H. Lawrence says of James Joyce‘s work that it is:

Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest, stewed in the juice of deliberate journalism and dirty-mindedness.

But the main entries are also grouped under themes or topics – from adaptations to writing. Other subjects range from inspiration, alcohol, and censorship, to characters, travel writing, the novel, science fiction, and even the writerly task of choosing names for characters.

There are also charming interpolations, such as ‘Borrowed titles’ where works such as Antic Hay, Blithe Spirit, and Darkness Visible are given their rightful sources.

It’s an excellent collection – focussed on literary themes and related matters, but because literature takes in everything from big ideas (philosophy) to details of good style and punctuation, most people will find these quotable comments of interest.

Amongst writers who come out well are Henry James, Evelyn Waugh, and even Julian Barnes. Some are pithy and insightful – such as Scott Fitzgerald:

An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.

Others make you wonder at the wisdom which comes from ‘success’ – as in Jeanette Winterson’s staggeringly vainglorious comments on being asked to name the best living author:

No one working in the English language now comes close to my exuberance, my passion, my fidelity to words.

What’s the difference, you might ask, between this and Dictionary of Quotations by Subject and the Concise Dictionary of Quotations. The answer is that this uses writers as sources, and its focus is on matters literary – all aspects of creativity, writers block, editing, publishers, style, reputation, libraries, and figures of speech. It’s a first rate example of its kind.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Peter Kemp, Dictionary of Literary Quotations, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd revised edition 2004, pp.512, ISBN: 0198662815

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Dictionary of Literary Terms

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explanations of the language of literary criticism

Do you want to know the difference between an epic poem and a tragedy? Between ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’? Between ‘naturalism’ and ‘realism’? Chris Baldick’s Dictionary of Literary Terms answers all these questions – and more besides. With entries which range from definitions of abjection to zeugma, it is in fact a guide to a mixture of old-fashioned grammatical terms, traditional drama, literary history, and textual criticism. It contains over 1,200 of the most troublesome literary terms you are likely to encounter. Some of the longer entries and explanations become like short essays on their subject.

Dictionary of Literary TermsHe also includes literary terms which have slipped into everyday use – such as ‘text’ and ‘interpretation’. He gives clear and often witty explanations of terms such as ‘hypertext’, ‘multi-accentuality’, and ‘postmodernism’. He also explains more common figures of speech such as the metaphor (straightforward) and those you can never remember such synecdoche and metonymy (can you really tell the difference between them?)

He also explains literary genres, from ‘the madrigal’ to ‘dirty realism’ and ‘the boddice ripper’, as well as offering potted accounts of theories such as structuralism and hermeneutics.

The latest (third) edition has been expanded and I was glad to see that he has added entry-level web links from OUP’s companion website to the book.

This will appeal to the general reader with an interest in literary studies, but it’s principally a useful reference for the advanced schoolroom or for undergraduates. And in fact – make that teachers too. I’ve had a copy of the first edition on my shelves for years, and I use it all the time.

© Roy Johnson 2008

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Chris Baldick, Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms, Oxford: Oxford University Press, (third edition) 2008, pp.361, ISBN: 0199208271

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Dictionary of Media and Communications

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definitions and explanations of new media terms

Dictionary of Media and Communications is an attempt to solve an interesting problem. I once bought a dictionary of computer technology (as it was then called). It was huge, comprehensive, and was written by an expert. Twelve months later there were terms I needed to look up that simply weren’t in there. That’s how fast new language is being created in the field of information technology (as it is now called). The same is largely true for media and communications. But in the meantime publishers have realised that works of this type need their own web sites that are regularly updated.

Dictionary of Media and CommunicationsDoes this mean that dictionaries in the form of printed books are obsolete? I think not – because for most people it’s still more convenient to reach a book off the shelf to solve a problem or look up a definition. And that’s quite apart from the secondary pleasure of reference books – making those serendipitous discoveries on adjacent pages.

With definitions of 2,300 terms this is without doubt the most comprehensive in its field. But its unique selling point is that terms are defined in a variety of contexts. Nuances of a term may vary depending on its use in semiotics, sociology, or film making. Entries run from aberrant decoding and above-the-fold via McLuhanism and male gaze, to yaw, zapping, and zoom. A typical entry reads as follows:

hypertext 1. A method, devised by Berners-Lee as part of his *World Wide Web software, of embedding omni-directional *links within a given digital *text (encoded in the form of an *HTML document and displayed on a *web browser) which connect to other HTML texts without the need for extra navigation. For example, a selected word of a text document or an area of an image document is defined as a *hyperlink which, when clicked on, loads the document at that address into the browser window. Hypertext is designed to be media independent (a text can link to a sound file, an image, or even a location in a *virtual world.) which makes it a *metonym for the versatility of *digital media generally. 2.2. A visionary concept of Ted Nelson (an American new media theorist, b.1937) for a *human-computer interface in which computers present a given text from multiple viewpoints, making it a malleable object that can be ‘played with’ in order to deepen a person’s understanding. For example, a hypertext version of Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy might consist of a standard edition of printed text, a facsimile of the earliest known version, a video recording of a performance, critical notes, and articles – all of which could be expanded from or collapsed back into the original text by clicking on a series of bi-directional links.. 3. For Genette, literary works which derive from, relate, or allude to an earlier work see also INTERTEXTUALITY. 4. Any text structured in a way that is nonlinear or non sequential, having no clear beginning, middle, and end, or in which the reader has control over the sequence. Where such texts link to others through *hyperlinks, the boundaries of the text may be blurred or the text may be perceived as unbounded.
See web links – Project Xanadu

It also has a listing of micro-biographies of major theorists and practitioners, plus a bibliography of suggested further reading. The compilers deny the existence of ‘key entries’, but many of the important entries are cross referenced and linked to the book’s web site.

The fields of reference include literary studies, semiotics, digital technology, broadcast media, journalism, film studies, psychology, and cultural theory. It’s aimed at people studying in any of these disciplines, but the definitions and explanations are accessible to the general reader.

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© Roy Johnson 2011

Daniel Chandler and Rod Munday, Dictionary of Media and Communication, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp.472, ISBN: 0199568758

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Dictionary of Modern Design

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design, designers, products, movements, influences

This Dictionary of Modern Design is a serious textual resource on design matters, written by somebody who is quite clearly steeped in his subject. Jonathan Woodham is Professor of the History of Design at the University of Brighton, and this compendium has all the hallmarks of being a summation of a lifetime’s work. It’s an A to Z compendium of entries which run from architects and designers Alvar and Aino Aalto, through to typographer and book designer Hermann Zapf. It covers the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth.

Dictionary of Modern Design There are over 2,000 entries on names and movements from the past 150 years of design. The only weakness is that there are hardly any illustrations – something they might rectify in a second edition. Individual entries are a mixture of individual designers – Paul Rand, Milton Glaser, and Jan Tschichold, plus movements such as Bauhaus, Omega workshops, and Wiener Werkstatte, to specific products such as The Dyson vacuum cleaner, Levi Strauss jeans, and the bathroom fittings suppliers Villeroy and Boch.

There are also entries on materials (polypropylene) places (Museum of Modern Art) events (Festival of Britain) institutions (the Design Institute) and even individual products such as Barby, the wonder doll, plus entries on companies (Habitat, IKEA) product strategies (flatpacks) materials (Formica) typographists (Eric Gill) and even shops (Biba and Healds).

Individual entries are punctuated by occasional pull-out boxes which define movements and general terms – such as art deco, constructivism, kitsch, neo-modernism, and streamlining. The entries are presented in a plain and uncluttered prose style, with cross references to related items:

Lissitsky, El (Lazar Markovich Lissitsky 1890—1941) The Russian *Constructivist typographer, graphic designer, architect, painter, photographer and theorist El Lissitsky was influential in the dissemination of *Modernism both through his work and his theoretical writings. He studied architecture and engineering under Joseph Maria *Olbrich and others at the Technical School at Darmstadt between 1909 and 1914, visiting Paris, the hub of avant-garde artistic activity, in 1911. He moved back to Russia to practise architecture in 1914, but also worked in the fine arts and illustration, underlining notions of his concept of the ‘artist-engineer’…
[and so on]

It’s a shame there aren’t more illustrations, but there’s a huge bibliography which reflects the scholarly provenance, a timeline which puts design events from 1840 to the present into a social and political context, and a comprehensive bibliography.

© Roy Johnson 2006

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Jonathan M. Woodham, A Dictionary of Modern Design, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp.544, ISBN: 0192806394

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Dictionary of Modern Slang

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street-speak, vulgar language, swearing and obscenities

As the editors say in their introduction to this latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang, ‘A year, to paraphrase Harold Wilson, is a long time in slang’. In fact the principal difficulty in compiling lexical resources of this type is what to leave out – because a great deal of slang is very evanescent. Oxford University Press have the advantage of compiling their dictionaries from the huge ‘Corpus’ of recorded language use which makes up the data base from which their publications are compiled. This is a collection of examples of how the English language is actually being used, drawn from the printed word – from literary novels and specialist journals to everyday newspapers and magazines, and from Hansard to the language of chatrooms, emails, and weblogs. The database contains over two billion words, and expands at the rate of 350 million words a year.

Dictionary of Modern SlangSo this assembly of what’s current has a better chance than most of being directly relevant – though you should remember that in order to qualify for inclusion in a dictionary, words have to be written down, not simply spoken. OUP also stipulate that they have to remain there for some time before they are considered for inclusion in dictionaries

The entries of this compilation run from abso-bloody-lutely and Acapulco gold via manky and meeja to wuss, yuckie, and zonker. As you can perhaps detect from this random selection, it’s rather polite in tone. There’s little of the ribaldry of Roger’s Profanisaurus or the scholarly rigour of Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English

There are lots of very dated references such as Ally-Pally (BBC) and Andrew (the navy) which I seriously doubt are in general circulation now – except with people over retirement age. But I was glad to see that it includes rhyming slang, as well as street language from other English-speaking cultures such as America and Australia, so the book could be useful if you’re thinking of emigrating.

There are also some linguistic curios in the form of words for which the etymology is simply not known – such as eighty-six (to refuse to serve someone in a restaurant) and others which just seem genuinely unusual and very entertaining – such as copacetic (outstanding) and gamahuche (cunnilingus or fellatio).

There is a certain respect given to lewd slang. The editors don’t balk at including carpet-muncher and mantee, but these entries are noticeably brief, and ladies in sensible shoes doesn’t get listed. They offer bristols and boobs, but not headlamps or hooters. I also looked in vain for the expressive rack, the amusingly faux-naive front-bottom, and the very well known Ugandan discussions. Entries on some less contentious issues are almost embarrassingly passé – such as goggle box (television) and knuckle sandwich (a punch).

There’s also a thematic index – because many of the terms are drawn from the worlds of drugs, sport, youth culture, and television, as well as traditional slang topics such as sex, money, and bodily functions. I always think that compilations of this kind are quire good fun, but all in all, there’s not much here that your maiden aunt could object to.

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© Roy Johnson 2010

John Ayto and John Simpson, Dictionary of Modern Slang, Oxford: Oxford University Press, (second edition) 2010, pp.408, ISBN: 0199232059

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Dictionary of Quotations by Subject

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memorable sayings by the clever and famous

Dictionaries of quotations used to be about ‘Who said that?’, whereas now people want to know ‘What has been said about this?’. In this new type of dictionary from Oxford University Press, you can do both. The latest volume in their newly revamped series of dictionaries is arranged by topics – ranging from traditional categories such as Courage and Love to more recent subjects like Computers and the Internet.

Dictionary of Quotations by Subject It’s a collection of over 9,000 quotations, covering an enormous range of nearly 600 themes, from over 2,400 authors. They are arranged alphabetically, and you can check who said something about which topic via an extensive double index of names and themes.

The general approach is to split categories down into smaller and more specific topics. So, instead of The Press, there are entries listed under Journalism, News, Newspapers, and Press Photographers. Gerald Priestland observes:

Journalists belong in the gutter, because that is where the ruling classes throw their guilty secrets.

The quotes themselves range from Julius Caesar and Jane Austen to Tony Blair and Madonna, and where the quotation needs a context to be appreciated, this is provided. Not that it does in the case of Lytton Strachey on his death bed:

If this is dying, then I don’t think much of it.

A book such as this is useful when racking your brains to recall where the lines quoted by an actor in a film came from. Surprisingly, many of the most famous, such as ‘Play it again, Sam’ and ‘Come up and see me some time’ turn out to be mis-quotations. And the best all seem to be propelled by deep feeling – even when it is self-mocking, as in the case of George Best:

People say I wasted my money. I say 90 percent went on women, fast cars, and booze. The rest I wasted.

The American ragtime pianist Eubie Blake struck a similar note when he commented, on becoming one hundred years old:

If I’d known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.

There are some brilliant one-liners, such as Stephen Fry’s ‘Reading newspapers is like opening a piece of used lavatory paper’ and Mae West’s ‘A hard man is good to find’. Woody Allen is also well represented – as in his bon mot on bisexuality:

It immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.

This type of compendium has three possible uses. It can serve as a straight work of reference if you are stuck for the source of a famous quotation; you might dip into it for bedtime relaxation; and it’s the sort of book which some people would keep in the lavatory for a few moments of light relief.

© Roy Johnson 2006

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Susan Ratcliffe (ed), Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 5th edn, 2006, pp.580, ISBN: 0198614179

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Dictionary of Rhyming Slang

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rhyming slang explained and brought up to date

Would you know what to do if you were left on your Jack Jones for a day with the saucepan lids? Rhyming slang originated in early nineteenth century London. Everyone knows that apples and pears = ‘stairs’, and whistle and flute = ‘suit’. Here’s how the system works. The rhyming word is the second of a pair, and the connection is not always obvious – as in Derby Kelly = ‘stomach’ (belly). But usage is made more complicated by the fact that it is the first, non-rhyming word which is spoken – so you go up the apples to bed, not the pears. This new Dictionary of Rhyming Slang explains explains all the well-known terms, and many you will never have heard of before.

Dictionary of Rhyming SlangIf that is not complex enough, the inventive and playful strain of rhyming slang is seen in the tendency to transfer via rhyme from the original term to more and more remote associations – as in bottle and glass = ‘bottom’ (arse), which becomes bottle; but that in its turn is rhymed with Aristotle, which is shortened to arris, which then in its turn is rhymed with April in Paris. Are you still with us?

The most commonly used terms in John Ayto’s amusing collection are coined for the perennial slang topics – body parts, sex, the lavatory, crime, drink, gambling, illness, and death. But he also covers such topics as work, sport, and even household objects.

It was once thought that rhyming slang was dying out, but the recent fashion for using celebrity names has proved this not to be true – as in [the now disgraced] Garry Glitter = ‘pint of bitter’, abbreviated to a Garry of course. The alternative might be to order a couple of Britneys (Spears).

All the people whose names have been memorialised in this way are given thumbnail biographies. Thus, the cast immortalising haemorrhoids includes Michael Miles, Nobby Stiles, Valentine Dyall, and Emma Freud.

[It is interesting to see that John Ayto cites Roger’s Profanisaurus Rex amongst his sources of authentic persuasive coinings. If you follow that link, be warned – it’s much stronger stuff.]

Drink does much better than food, rhyming slang is obviously largely the province of the male, and it often embeds itself so deeply into general linguistic usage that we are hardly conscious of it – as in porkies (porky pies) for ‘lies’, and loaf (loaf of bread) for ‘head’.

There’s a big index, so you can easily locate any term you hear but whose meaning you can’t guess (as I couldn’t with balaclava). This is an excellent and certainly bang up-to-date account of what is obviously still a thriving sub-set of English Language.

© Roy Johnson 2003

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John Ayto, Dictionary of Rhyming Slang, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp.309, ISBN: 0198607512

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Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms

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lists of words, their alternatives, and their opposites

This Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms should appeal to a number of different users — editors, poets, crossword fans, and word puzzle solvers in general. It’s an easy-to-use source of over 150,000 alternative and opposite words to improve your wordpower and communication skills, and make your English more interesting and original. In fact it’s two books in one, because the dictionary is followed by a huge lexicon of what are termed ‘hard words’.

Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms These are unusual and obscure words you might wish to use in unusual circumstances, running from abattis (a defence made of felled trees with the boughs pointing outwards) to zymurgy (the branch of applied chemistry dealing with the use of fermentation in brewing). The main part of the book offers each headword entry followed by synonyms which are listed alphabetically, and antonyms are placed at the end of entries where appropriate. There are examples to show how words of less obvious senses are used, and markers such as ‘informal’, ‘derogatory’, and ‘obsolete’ highlight the usage style.

For instance, let’s say you wanted to avoid repeating the word hard in a piece of writing. You look up the word and choose from a list of alternatives – and they are arranged in groups according to the sense in which the word is being used:

hard adj 1 adamantine, compact, compressed, dense, firm, flinty, frozen, hardened, impenetrable, impervious, inflexible, rigid, rocky, solid, solidified, steely, stiff, stony, unbreakable, unyielding. 2 hard labour. arduous, back-breaking, exhausting, fatiguing, formidable, gruelling, harsh, heavy, laborious, onerous, rigorous, severe, stiff, strenuous, taxing, tiring, tough, uphill, wearying. 3 a hard problem. baffling, complex, complicated, confusing, difficult, enigmatic, insoluble, intricate, involved, knotty, perplexing, puzzling, tangled, inf thorny. 4 a hard heart. callous, cold, cruel inf hard-boiled, hard-hearted, harsh, heartless, hostile, inflexible, intolerant, merciless, obdurate, pitiless, ruthless, severe, stern, strict, unbending, unfeeling, unfriendly, unkind. 5 a hard blow. forceful, heavy, powerful, strong, violent. 6 hard times. austere, bad, calamitous, disagreeable, distressing, grim, intolerable, painful, unhappy, unpleasant. 7 a hard worker. assiduous, conscientious, devoted, indefatigable, industrious, keen, persistent, unflagging, untiring, zealous. Opp EASY, SOFT. hard-headed > BUSINESSLIKE. hard-hearted > CRUEL. hard up > POOR. hard-wearing > DURABLE.

It has to be said that the synonyms fare better than the antonyms, and of course there are plenty of terms for which there are no antonyms – bicycle for instance. Plenty of synonyms – bike, cycle, two-wheeler – and so on, but no anti-bicycle.

This could also be very useful for crossword addicts in solving those clues which are posed in finding one word which means the same as another – as in ‘adamantine (4)’ = hard.

© Roy Johnson 2007

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Alan Spooner (ed), Oxford Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edition 2007, pp.528, ISBN: 0199210659

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Dictionary of the Internet

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Internet jargon and IT technical terms explained

Do you know what a ‘dongle’, a ‘sandbox’, and a ‘Ponzi scheme’ are? The Internet and its technology is expanding at such a blistering rate, that it’s difficult to keep up. Sometimes it’s even hard to understand the terms in which it’s all described. This Dictionary of the Internet explains the thousands of new terms which have come into use during the last few years. This includes the abbreviations of the newsgroups, the language of e-commerce, and the scientific terms used to describe the technical and organisational structure of the Internet.

Dictionary of the Internet It provides terms on the Web itself, software technology, security, and the arcane language of hackers, whitehats, and alpha geeks. It gains its strength from concentrating in depth on the Internet and its infrastructure, rather than on general computing terms. Entries run from ‘above the fold’ – an expression taken from the newspaper industry which is now applied to Web design – to ‘Z order’ – the sequence in which layers are added to a graphic or a Web page.

In between, there’s a useful and very entertaining mixture of the language of bleeding edge technology [yes, that’s in] as well as the slang, vogue terms, and prolific coinings of newsgroups. Darrell Ince’s explanations are so thorough that some of them are like mini-tutorials. I read them through from first entry to last and learned something interesting on almost every page.

The book is issued with a CD which contains the full dictionary entries in a browsable format, with hyperlinks. There are also links to relevant websites. The dictionary is supported by a separate web site where updates for downloading are posted. This is a wonderfully rich compendium – as smack up to date as it’s possible to be.

© Roy Johnson 2003

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Darrel Ince, Dictionary of the Internet, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp.340, ISBN: 019280460X

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