A long and distinguished tradition of writers have used the form of a satirical Dictionary to undermine the received ideas of their day.
But Saul deploys these tactics of guerilla lexicography to advance the more serious purpose of reclaiming public language from the stultifying dialects of modern expertise..
There is much in this volume that will stimulate, offend, provoke, perplex, and entertain.
In The Doubter\'s Companion , a mar-velous subversive contribution to the great 18th century tradition of the humanist dictionary, Saul skewers and discredits the accepted content of Common terms like Advertising, Academics, and Air Conditioning (defined as an efficient means for spreading disease in enclosed public spaces)
Cannibal, Conservative, and Croissant
Dandruff, Death, and Dictionary (opinions presented as truth in alphabetical order); and several hundred others, including Biography (a respectable form of pornography), Museum (safe storage for stolen objects), and Manners (people are always splendid when they\'re dead).
Our language has become as predictable, fragmented, and rhetorical as it was in the 18th century, divided as it is by special interest groups into dialects of expertise that are hermetically sealed off and inaccessible to citizens.
But as John Ralston Saul argues in this decidedly unorthodox book, modern dictionaries have once again been captured by the forces of orthodoxy--albeit this time a rationalist orthodoxy.
Their authors attacked and exposed the half-truths of their day by showing that it was possible to think differently about the social and political arrangements that everyone took for granted.
These early dictionaries and encyclopedias were really weapons in a struggle for the soul of civilization between forces of humanistic enlightenment and the forces of orthodoxy and dogmatism.
Voltaire wrote a sharply humorous Philosophical Dictionary, while Samuel Johnson\'s Dictionary of the English language was derisive and opinionated.
A long and distinguished tradition of writers have used the form of a satirical Dictionary to undermine the received ideas of their day
