A perfect blend of humor and practical knowledge for word lovers.

Build a superior vocabulary with 1,000 words--esoteric, arcane, archaic, unusual words with "real life" examples of how to deploy them. Includes definitions and practical advice on usage to confound your friends, irritate your enemies, and impress your superiors. Peter Bowler's aim is to provide "the ordinary man in the street with new and better verbal weapons--words which until now have been available only to philologists, lexicographers, and art critics." Thus the reader will not only learn the meaning of aprosexia, but also how best to use it when filling out their sick leave application form. Sample sentences, in comprehensible and often hilarious prose, are given for every word providing a verbal arsenal potent enough to "confuse, deter, embarrass, humiliate, puzzle, deceive, disconcert, alarm, insult (and occasionally compliment) everyone" with relative impunity. Learn only a hundred or so of these and confirm the author's ambition to give you, his readers, "a more finely tuned engine of the language they speak, so they more readily assert their linguistic superiority over their fellow travelers at the traffic stops of life." And there's still more: anecdotes of eccentric scholars, unbelievable tales of the cupidity and stupidity of the rich and famous, examples of idiot conceits and further curiosities of life. This is a treasure house for lovers of words and their possibilities.