Bookworks Presents Shelf Awareness for Readers: Spinning English

Self-proclaimed "semi-bestselling" satirists Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf's latest offering,Spinglish (Blue Rider Press), is a collection of examples of deliberately deceptive language or, as they call it, a "bullschictionary." If you want to succeed in life, they say you have to excel in "terminological inexactitude." If you can name it, "someone can rename it to make it sound a whole lot better and promote it with a flurry of press releases flogged by a host of professional Spinocchios and hundreds of highly paid liars with fireproof pants...."

There are so many stunning entries in the book that it's hard to winnow them down to a few. Some are familiar: "collateral damage" and the 1960s' "plausible denial." If you are house-hunting, you'll have discovered a "vibrant" area is deafeningly noisy. Some Spinglish is funny--remember "hiking the Appalachian Trail?" Some is funny and depressing--"vegetation manipulation" to describe clearcutting.

Politics provides some of the best Spinglish. When the U.S. invaded Panama in 1989, columnist George Will called it a "good-neighbor policy... an act of hemispheric hygiene." To reverse the negative feelings about lobbyists, they call themselves "legislative leadership advocates." In Venezuela, censorship by another name has been called "a paper shortage." There are numerous business contributions: Citibank in 2012 characterized its layoffs of more than 11,000 worldwide as "optimizing the consumer footprint across geographies." Rebranding a somewhat unattractive fish known as the slimehead into "orange roughy" worked so well that it's now on a threatened species list. In the journalism world, the New York Times called a case of plagiarism "unacknowledged repetition."

Spinglish is a delightful (and maddening) compendium of obscurantism, backed up by citations. I'm just sorry they left out the noxious "open the kimono." It deserves their deft skewering. --Marilyn Dahl, editor, Shelf Awareness for Readers

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