Book of Donmon Teith

Jacques Barzun's masterful translation proves that Flaubert's Dictionary of Accepted Ideas--an acid catalogue of the clichés of 19th-century France--is as rele

Spoken and written language is littered with cliches, but there are some usages - smug statements of secondhand opinion, grating nuggets of folk wisdom, toe-cur

“Dictionary, n: A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most usefu

Bouvard and Pécuchet are two Chaplinesque copy-clerks who meet on a park bench in Paris. Following an unexpected inheritance, they decide to give up their jobs

Characters in some languages, particularly Hebrew and Arabic, may not display properly due to device limitations. Transliterations of terms appear before the re