Sayings of the Century by Nigel Rees; Wordly Wise by James McDonald; The State of the Language: English Observed by Philip Howard - review by Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis

Snobs & Stuffed Shirts

Sayings of the Century

By

Allen & Unwin 278pp £8.95

Wordly Wise

By

Constable 303pp £9.95

The State of the Language: English Observed

By

Hamish Hamilton 192pp £8.95
 

I am not sure what the connection is between the decline of written and spoken English and the outpouring of books on words, not just dictionaries and guides to usage but collections of slang, quotations, proverbs, catch phrases, dialect expressions, paradoxes, bulls, euphemisms and puns just for a start. I have in my sell-off pile a work entirely devoted to oxymoron. (Volumes on hendiadys, synecdoche and aposiopesis to follow?)

But anyway, out they continue to pour. Nigel Rees, famous as a broadcaster on the subject, has collected hundreds of well-known modern sayings and traced them back to their origins. The stock of human knowledge is not much advanced by the enterprise and the reader is quickly reduced to torpor

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter