Short Cuts: A Guide to Oaths, Ring Tones, Ransom Notes, Famous Last Words, and Other Forms of Minimalist Communication Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Short Cuts: A Guide to Oaths, Ring Tones, Ransom Notes, Famous Last Words, and Other Forms of Minimalist Communication? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Short Cuts: A Guide to Oaths, Ring Tones, Ransom Notes, Famous Last Words, and Other Forms of Minimalist Communication. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Short Cuts: A Guide to Oaths, Ring Tones, Ransom Notes, Famous Last Words, and Other Forms of Minimalist Communication ReviewSome readers may be searching for the ideal prescriptive usage manual for the short forms in which we do our daily linguistic business; this is not that sort of book. What it does do is tell us how people actually DO use the icon, the bank holdup note, skywriting, texting, and other miniature communication forms, with plenty of entertaining back-story on how these came to be (some of them, for all the apparent modernity of the short take as message, dating all the way back to the Romans and even beyond). Like the authors' previous offerings, this is a book that can be nibbled at for a mental bedtime snack or, for the truly ravenous logophile, devoured at one sitting (well, two or three anyway; there is a thundering lot of information in here.) Ideal for the reader who always wanted to know why newspaper headlines sometimes make unwitting gaffes ("Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim") or what (and why) the term is for a deliberately spurious dictionary entry inserted by the editors to foil lexicographic plagiarism by the competition (a "mountweazel"). An immensely entertaining book. (Warning: In spots it is also quite funny and may make you laugh out loud, so you probably shouldn't browse it in the library's reading room or the Amtrak train's Quiet Car, just to be on thesafe side.)Short Cuts: A Guide to Oaths, Ring Tones, Ransom Notes, Famous Last Words, and Other Forms of Minimalist Communication OverviewOur everyday lives are inevitably touched--and immeasurably enriched--by an extraordinary variety of miniature forms of verbal communication, from classified ads to street signs, and from yesterday's graffito to tomorrow's headline. Celebrating our long history of compact speech, Short Cuts offers a well-researched and vibrantly written account of this unsung corner of the linguistic world, inspiring a new appreciation of the wondrously varied forms of our briefest exchanges.Alexander Humez, Nicholas Humez, and Rob Flynn shed light here on an ever-growing field of minimalist genres, ranging from the bank robbery note to the billboard, from the curse hurled from a car window (or the Senate floor) to the suicide note, and from the ghost-word to the ring tone. The book is divided into ten thematic sections, as varied as "In the Dictionary" (discussing such topics as Sniglets, Mountweazels, and the Wiktionary), "In and Out of Trouble" (error messages, weasel words, the pre-nup), and "On the Lam" (ransom notes, wanted posters, portraits parlés). The authors look at the comic strip's maladicta balloon and the dinner-interrupter's robocalls, the advice column and the obit, and the many ways your personal appearance tells us who you are, from the message on your gimme cap to the tattoo with your S.O.'s name on your ankle. Uncovering the elegance, the humor, and the unspoken implications in these fleeting communications, this book provides a satisfying thoroughness and an abundance of connections that unravel how the oath became the swearword and the calling card salver turned into the Facebook wall. For readers who love language and enjoy rummaging through the cultural baggage that comes with it, Short Cuts gathers an engaging sampler of the most delightful and cogent--and above all brief--forms of contemporary English.

Want to learn more information about Short Cuts: A Guide to Oaths, Ring Tones, Ransom Notes, Famous Last Words, and Other Forms of Minimalist Communication?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now