The completely superior person's book of words

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THE COMPLETELY SUPERIOR PERSON'S BOOK OF WORDS
By Peter Bowler
Bloomsbury $40

It's perhaps less true than it was a few years ago, but journalists are a disproportionately foul-mouthed bunch.

I've worked on the wharves and in newsrooms and I know where the air was bluer.

I have always claimed that when you spend your whole working day choosing your words very carefully, on your time off it is natural to resort to the most celebrated four-letter word with an "-ing" on the end as a catch-all adverb.

This theory may seem glib, but it's strengthened by the passage of time. A deceased and much-missed news editor used to address me daily with a taboo expletive that would now earn him disciplinary proceedings.

Today's young journos, by contrast, are very decently spoken but few seem to know or care (as that news editor certainly did) about the difference between "disinterested" and "uninterested", say, or "imply" and "infer".

So they will certainly not be numbered among this book's enthusiastic buyers, since the meaning will be a matter of sublime indifference to them.

Newspapers, as a rule, and quite rightly, tend to have little time for the polysyllable: "utilise" will never be better than "use" and "inexpensive" is just a rich person's word for "cheap".

So this entertaining volume should perhaps be kept away from all journalists.

It should also be withheld from anyone with a propensity for gratuitous verbosity.

Its readers need to know when a long word is needed: when there is no short one that will do.

This book - a compendium of three previously published collections - will offer hours of amusing browsing.

The selections range from the wilfully obscure (is "hypobulia" really better than "indecisiveness"?) to the useful (the real meaning of the popular "matrix"). And some entries are just excuses for whimsical ruminations reminiscent of Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary: a bowler, for example, is defined as a cricketer "who, on blundering badly, gets another chance - in contradistinction to a batsman, who does not".

Hours of fun for the word-mad, then, but some cross-referencing may be in order. Bowler has swallowed whole and regurgitated the hoary and mischievous fiction about "zzxjoanw" - the ultimate Scrabble word - being "a Maori drum". That news editor wouldn't have fallen for that. And neither, one hopes, would any nicely spoken young journalist.