Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Wordbirds

Wordbirds by Liesl Schillinger   224 pages.

"If you’ve escaped binary confinement and find yourself rushing cell-mell to a clusterfete— slurpwalking as you commutikaze—then who are you?

You are a typical citizen of the young millennium, caught up in the fast-paced megatasking socio-professional whirl of our ever-evolving digitally-enhanced lives.

If you’ve ever wondered what to call it when you answer the TV remote instead of the phone, or wished you had a phrase to capture your supervisor’s stealth campaign to stall your career, here is your guide. Now you can say “Oops, droidian slip!” with ease, and call out your boss for the impedimentor that he is. Armed with Wordbirds, you will be able to skillfully talk your way into, or out of, any situation the twenty-first century throws at you."

I couldn't have come up with a better summary.  In this beautifully illustrated book, the author takes us, term by term, through chapters such as "fashion and style," "friends, frenemies and fellow students," "domestic life," and more. The terms are stated, shown in a sentence and accompanied by a beautiful bird illustration.  I found many of these that would be fun to use in my everyday conversations, and some where the picture was pretty enough to frame.  Some of them definitely made me laugh, like this one, for "rotter."

Rotter (n.) 'rah-tur  The plastic drawer in a refrigerator where fresh vegetables are put away to keep "crisp," but where, hidden away, they typically decay until they become foul sludge.

This is an example of an illustration.  Nice, yes?

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