The Years of Talking Dangerously
Geoffrey Nunberg
The Years of Talking Dangerously
“There has never been,” Nunberg writes, “an age as wary as ours of the tricks words can play, obscuring distinctions and smoothing over the corrugations of the actual world.... Yet as advertisers and marketers know, our mistrust of words doesn’t inoculate us against them.” These are the years of talking dangerously. In this book Nunberg decodes the changing syntax of Time Magazine, explains why grammar buffs are drawn to sarcasm, and unpacks the telling phrases of the USA's national conversation, from progressive to elite to change—not to mention national conversation itself.
3.5 out of 5 based on 1 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Language & Linguistics |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
288 |
| RRP |
£10.99 |
| Date of Publication |
June 2009 |
| ISBN |
978-1586487454 |
| Publisher |
PublicAffairs |
| |
“There has never been,” Nunberg writes, “an age as wary as ours of the tricks words can play, obscuring distinctions and smoothing over the corrugations of the actual world.... Yet as advertisers and marketers know, our mistrust of words doesn’t inoculate us against them.” These are the years of talking dangerously. In this book Nunberg decodes the changing syntax of Time Magazine, explains why grammar buffs are drawn to sarcasm, and unpacks the telling phrases of the USA's national conversation, from progressive to elite to change—not to mention national conversation itself.
Reviews
The Guardian
Steven Poole
"Occasionally one wishes for more detailed argument than was possible in these brief commissions (Nunberg on "nonapologies" is fine, but lacks the forensic energy of Adams's elucidation of the slang nonapology, "My bad"). Arguably Nunberg is best at noticing small, telling usages - he is very good on the "pseudo-deferential" nature of internet-era "Um"; and a 2004 piece comparing the rhetoric of John Kerry (who often started his sentences with "Now", signalling a tortuous sequence of concession-then-disagreement) and George W Bush (who used "See" to introduce the crashingly obvious) is a tour de force."
25/07/2009
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