The Gilded Tongue: Overly Eloquent Words for Everyday Things

What a humbling experience! As one who has been an avid and faithful reader of, among others, both William F. Buckley and John Kenneth Galbraith, I've been a collector of unusual words for the past 35 years. So, when I received my holiday gift of "The Gilded Tongue: Overly Eloquent Words for Everyday Things", I thought that perhaps I might pick up a new word or two. Wrong! While I don't have the exact statistics (which is a bit surprising in itself, insofar as I'm a CPA by training), I'd speculate that 90% of the entries in this volume were foreign to me. So, if you enjoy stretching your brain a bit with words that go far beyond the obscure, have I got a book for you! I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the Appendix of Web Sites for Word Lovers (a great resource), the Reverse Dictionary (very useful), and the quite luxurious velvet cover (so very appropriate).

The Guilded Tongue, by Rod Evans, is truly a verbal Temple of Venus, a wonder-sphere of verbal angels, a veritable batallion of shape-shifting powers generating ornamental delight that magically enchants the work-a-day world with its usual banal and caucaphonic emissions of brain-dead verbs, and tongue-tied adjectives, logostatic cliches, and tired idioms that constitute the bulk of most human talk. This beautifully-bound and thoughtfully laid out tome will equip one with circumlocutive skils enabling perfumed verbal fogs to roll off the tongue and stun ones rivals and enemies, or to empower and augment the language of love. Here truly are Apollo's lyre and Pan's pipes to warm an afternoon of love, to elevate conversation from the depths of bathos to the high sublimity of philosophical song. Say goodbye to the dingy world of witless verbal sobriety and become intoxicated with the nectar of these exotic word-flowers. Join the all-but-forgotten dance of the maters of verbal wit and demand to hear more refined speech than all the dictionaries of the world can pour forth, just as one might wish to eat finer bread than than wheat mills can produce, to wear finer clothes made from cloth that no spinning wheel can create. Thank you, Rodney Evans, whoever you are, for generously sharing what must have been decades of research in the lexifluous and recondite and rotting treasures in old books, dungeons, attics where time and language have stood still. A warning to the reader: read this book with caution--it has many secrets to tell, not all of them are drawing-room tame.

The Gilded Tongue is as entertaining as it is educational in defining this collection of exotic but relevant & even handy words. I enjoy dipping into the book to learn about an obscure word's humble roots. Professor Evans provides succinct definitions and sample sentences in addition to a pronunciation guide to each word and a list of additional resources, including online ones. Having said all that, my favorite feature is that The Gilded Tongue includes a valuable reverse dictionary so that I can use it to find the words I want. The Gilded Tongue is a highly valuable resource!

You don't have to be a PYSMATIC LOGOMANIAC to enjoy this book, but it helps. You'll learn that Dolly Parton is BATHYCOLPIAN, that Osama bin Ladin is a CAITIFF, that H.Ross Perot is MACROTOUS, that H.L. Mencken truly was a NULLIFIAN, and that many lawyers engage in PLEONASM. The words in all caps are among the gems I discovered in this treasure-trove of "overly eloquent words for everday things," which includes a handy "reverse dictionary" in the appendix that enables even the most linguistically challenged reader to become erudite. Among my personal favorites in the book is KAKISTOCRACY (government by the worst people), an apt description of American politics today. I'm urging all my bibliophilic friends to buy this splendid book.

This was a VERY, VERY, scrumptious read! For any bibliophile, or logomaniac, this is a definite good choice! I paid full list price for this at Borders in Long Beach, CA, and it was WORTH EVERY PENNY! Funny words, neat words, strange and obscure words, everything! You name it! For anyone who loves grandiloquent speech, this is a must!