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Dictionary of Bullshit
By Nick Webb
There's much delight to be had in exposing the misstatements, exaggerations and deliberate obfuscations of our modern (English) language. In The Dictionary of Bullshit, a compendium of the linguistic garbage that passes for meaningful discourse in our modern world, Stoke Newington resident and N16 magazine contributor Nick Webb offers numerous well-chosen examples of the absurd, the grotesque, the downright misleading and the frankly baffling.
Webb doesn't claim his survey is exhaustive or his selections balanced - but that's part of the enjoyment. He wears his irascible old codger disguise lightly, rather a la Truss (whose equally nondefinitive work on punctuation, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, was a surprise best-seller a little while ago), and lets a variety of bees buzz loudly in his bonnet in the course of his dissection of mots that are never going to be juste, if he has anything to do with it.
But it's not all good clean fun: beneath the jokey veneer (surely Nick would want to critique that turn of phrase?), there lurks a much more serious intent.
While Webb's happy to poke fun at the simply stupid corporatespeak coinages that have baffled intelligent life forms for decades now, he is also concerned at the spread of what he calls Capital B Bullshit - the weapons grade variety - which has, he argues, so debased language and obscured understanding that it has become as invidious and as potentially lethal, in its way, as the spread of globalisation. And he makes a serious and well-argued case against the mis-use of statistics and the deployment of sloppy science in mainstream journalism, even of the Berliner variety.
If the result of Webb's labours is unavoidably uneven, and the categories occasionally arbitrary, so much the better. Then we can hope for more. In the world of bullshit detection,
we need all the help we can get. Let's hope further volumes beckon . (Hope the publisher is reading this, Nick: is your cheque in the post?)
(Robson Books, £9.99)
Review by Anne Beech
The Welfare of the Dead
By Lee Jackson
Lee Jackson's third period thriller, The Welfare of the Dead, confirms his reputation as a writer utterly at home in the dank and dangerous world of Victorian London - an imperial capital he brings vividly and effortlessly to life. From fog to furniture, every detail rings true.
Jackson's Inspector Decimus Webb (no relation to Nick Webb, as far as we know), newly promoted to the detective branch at Scotland Yard, faces an apparently random series of particularly brutal killings.
Young women of doubtful repute, but with no other connection, are found murdered. A grave is disturbed at Abney Park cemetery - the last resting place of a disgraced suicide victim. The respectable proprietor of the Holborn General Mourning Parlour, Jasper Woodrow, appears to be implicated. But all is not as it seems.
As Webb delves beneath the surface proprieties of Victorian society, he uncovers unlikely and unsavoury business rivalries in the funeral trade, long-buried family scandals - and an unexpectedly living link between Abney Park and the killer.
An atmospheric page-turner with added Stoke Newington, in Jackson's beautifully evocative re-creation of Abney Park in its heyday, as Church Street and The Three Crowns (now Bar Lorca) all help to provide local colour. Jackson, of course, is a Stoke Newington resident. Let's hope N16 features in Decimus's further adventures.
(Arrow, £6.99)
Review by Anne Beech
Slouching
off
By Saskia Little-Brown
Wherein our sad excuse for a well-toned wannabe finally calls it
quits and says a temporary goodbye to the world of fitness and
well-being, and to Sunstone.
Who was it who said: 'Try again. Fail again. Fail better'? (Samuel Beckett.
Ed.)
Well, believe me, I tried. Tried getting stuck in traffic and getting home too late to make the start of the Pilates class. Tried forgetting when the aerobics session started. (Diary? What diary? Palm pilot, me, when I can make the damn thing work and I've remembered to charge it and take the little pointy thing with me.)
Even tried losing one of my still almost-box-fresh trainers.
But still, Sunstone endured, ever-faithful, forgiving, ready to welcome me back. My little laminated membership card reproached me from the bottom of my bag, or at least it did every time I sent a search party in there for the house keys.
Guilt kicked in occasionally - and I've been known to do very good guilt, on a global scale. I even do guilt for other people, who should feel it but don't. I'm sel?ess like that. But hitherto unknown reserves of steely determination (which is what we're calling laziness in my circles) kept me unwaveringly on the path of slackness and inertia. That, and the fact that it was cold outside and I'm afraid of the dark.
With Spring, and a beckoning gardenette, I worked out a setaside agreement with my conscience that would have made an EU commissioner proud. Every hour in the garden (I'd read somewhere) equalled the equivalent of a 30-minute cardiovascular work-out. Or something. I think the equation may have involved actually doing something, like digging, which our extended window box couldn't really accommodate, but I didn't want any mucky facts getting in the way of such a neat arrangement. And once you've got a garden to sit in, dug or undug, what's the point of going out again? Especially when things in the garden smell nice and other people's sweaty feet don't?
Then came the only bit of summer that I can remember: the short hot bit. And a helpful government health warning about excessive exercise in high temperatures, which they said was for very old people, not just medium old people like me - but I've never been a risk-taker, so I thought I'd heed it. I wasn't throwing caution or anything else to the winds, in the circs. Fifty-something is a dangerous age.
And now, of course, as the nights draw in, we've got bird flu to worry about. It's a case of watch out, there are birds about.
Dangerous ones with sniffles. And one of them might cough nasty germs all over me as I walk across the common on my way to the gym. A hazard, you see?
Perhaps next year, though. When I'm even older and more decrepit, if no wiser - and Sunstone will have a fresh range of classes with wheel-chair access for the almost totally immobile with replacement hips.
In the meantime: trainers, anyone? Hardly worn, as new. Ladies size 6. And still very white.
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