The Miss Grundy grammarians in the crowd may not always like Hitchings’ line of argument, which some will find shockingly...
Caring about the propriety and properness of language is so gay.
Those are fighting words. In fact, there are fighting words in just about every utterance we make. But, observes Evening Standard theater critic Hitchings (The Secret Life of Words, 2008, etc.), some words are fighting-er than others. “When I was younger,” he writes (the author was born in 1974), “one of the most common complaints I heard about any aspect of the English language was the change in the use of the word gay.” No longer a word meaning “merry” among the oldsters, “gay” had come to mean something else—though it had come to mean that something else well before World War II and had just taken time to catch up. “Experience suggests”—not “past experience,” which is redundant—“that you can always start a row by staking a claim about English usage,” he writes. And he’s right. Go around insisting that “data” must be always a plural, agreeing with the plural verb form—“the data are convincing”—and you’ll wind up with a mouthful of loose teeth one day; go around using “gay” flippantly, and you’ll be branded as incorrect and worse. But proscriptive and prescriptive grammarians have been with us always, or at least since the Georgian age, when Britons seemed very ill at ease speaking their mother tongue and a catastrophic social faux pas was always only a syllable away. Hitchings is good on the history of that dis-ease, and though he lacks the zest of some of the old-timey word writers, from Edwin Newman to the sainted H.L. Mencken, he acquits himself well on the use, misuse, disuse and abuse of English grammar over the centuries.
The Miss Grundy grammarians in the crowd may not always like Hitchings’ line of argument, which some will find shockingly permissive because realistic. But word lovers will.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-18329-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
