Books In Brief // Language

Here are some books for people who love the English language and its many uses:

Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists

By James Geary Bloomsbury USA / 448 pages / $19.95

Both an expert and a collector, James Geary has devoted his life to aphorisms - and the last few years to organizing, indexing and even translating them. The result is Geary's Guide, featuring classic writers like Voltaire, Twain, Shakespeare and Nietzsche, but also more surprising figures, such as Woody Allen, Muhammad Ali, Emily Dickinson and Mae West. Some of the aphorists appear in English for the first time. But it is more than just a conventional anthology. It is also an encyclopedia, containing brief biographies of each author in addition to a selection of his or her aphorisms. The book is a field guide, too, with aphorists organized into eight different "species," such as Comics, Critics & Satirists; Icons & Iconoclasts; and Painters & Poets. The book's two indexes - by author and by subject - make it easily searchable, while its unique organizational structure and Geary's lively biographical entries make it different from all previous reference works.

How Not To Say What You Mean: A Dictionary of Euphemisms

By R.W. Holder / Oxford University Press, USA / 384 pages / $18.95

Delightful, quirky and exhaustive, Holder's dictionary of American and British circumlocutions is the kind of reference work that one can spend hours browsing through happily. This third edition includes thousands of alphabetized entries for both old-fashioned and contemporary terms. The term "uncover nakedness," for example, used be a standard biblical translation for "copulate," though many people wouldn't recognize that use today. (Incidentally, "to line" also meant to copulate, and Holder cites part of Shakespeare's As You Like It as an example of such use: "Winter garments must be lined/So must slender Rosalind.") "Deep six," "underprivileged" and "rip off" still enjoy healthy use, and in Ireland "scuttered" still means "drunk." For Holder, however, this project is about more than just having fun with word games. In fine Orwellian spirit, Holder writes in his introduction that euphemism is "the language of evasion, of hypocrisy, of prudery and of deceit," which makes it all the more important to be able to see through the embroidery.

Filthy Shakespeare

By Pauline Kiernan / Gotham / $20