Abby Travis just reviewed it for the Rain Taxi Review – have a read:

Words are supposed to be solid and reliable, the basic building blocks with which we create structures like sentences, paragraphs, books—and, through these, meaning. This hardly seems like a revelatory thought, but as with many structures, a great deal occurred over time to create the meaning that these very words contain. Ruth Wajnryb’s latest book, You Know What I Mean?, attempts to tackle the oddities of meaning: how certain words and phrases have developed over time, how they behave, what forces dictate the changes in language today, and why we choose the words we do.

Although Wajnryb is generally successful, readers looking for a cohesive whole may be disappointed. Her book comprises ten chapters, each of which tackle a different subject like “Gender,” “Text-types,” or “Word Biographies”; these are divided into even shorter essays that are usually under two pages. For a book 225 pages long, this results in over 100 essays, and in order to tie these essays together, each chapter’s half-page introduction invariably unleashes some variation of the dreaded “This section contains…” Wajnryb’s goal is to demystify various aspects of an often-confusing language, so one can’t really blame her for taking the most direct approach; unfortunately, the elementary introduction doesn’t always set up a flawless demystification, and the brief nature of her essays rarely offers enough space to explain fully the “why” factor she claims to resolve. While sometimes the essays merely end on some witty note or pun, in some instances she actually concedes that there is no explanation—, for example, in terms of reduplicative words (such as “fuddy-duddy,” “heebie-jeebies,” or even “reduplicative” itself) she writes, “I’ve searched but haven’t yet unearthed an explanation. Sometimes, illogically, we just repeat ourselves. Repeat ourselves.” At least she gets the point across.

What Wajnryb does quite well is pique her reader’s interest, maintaining it through contemporary references and the occasional tangent, all with the added bonus of her keen, snarky humor. The American reader will learn a little something about Australian politics and what the Collins Australian Dictionary has to say about the contained definition or origins of a word (she uses the Oxford English Dictionary quite frequently as well). Topics vary from grammar basics (“you” and “me” do not simply refer to me and you), to the linguist’s cringe at poorly worded signs (we’ve all been there), to war words. “Vietnam,” for example, is no longer just a place, it has morphed into an entire concept. She refers to Saddam Hussein on multiple occasions, but also returns to “Dogese” (the conversational tone and level of informality that occurs when dog owners meet and converse briefly while out for a walk with their companions) several times as well. The ephemeral nature of Wajnryb’s plethora of topics is probably best suited for the ephemeral reader (if you can figure that out, you’re ready for the book).

Keep reading at Rain Taxi >>

As a side note, the Book Design Review just posted its favorite book cover designs of 2008.

My local second-hand bookstore, Books On Bronte (referring to the Sydney suburb not the writers), takes full advantage of its large front window. A rapid turnaround of titles makes for pleasant gazing on my morning or evening walks with the dog. Indeed, she has learned to stop and sit patiently while I peer at the display. A recent example – there one morning, gone that evening – was How to Succeed in Business Without a Penis. The owner of the bookstore told me later that it was in the window barely a nanosecond before it was spied and snapped up.

Title-gazing certainly reinforces the power of a book’s title. I’m not discounting the other para-texts – messages transmitted via colour, texture, size, smell, typographical choices, back blurb, etc. – all collaborators in the process of impression-management. But titles do it for me. The truth is my own shelves are lined with books acquired for their titular allure alone. The day I bought the expensive hardback Khrushchev’s Shoe, I wasn’t looking for something on public speaking. But it resonated with my inner Baby Boomer – so clearly do I recall the shocked world on that day when, in the United Nations, Mr K took his shoe off and delivered his prediction (erroneous, as it turned out) that communism would bury capitalism (though, I’ve since been told by a Russian speaker, the text was poorly translated).

No doubt, if not for that shoe, his rant would have disappeared down the drain of the forgettably ordinary. Then there’s How to Visit America and Enjoy It. I’m struck by the power of the ‘and’ – the implication is that visiting and not-enjoying America is the default position, but it’s not obligatory. Subtext: buy me and find out how! A sobering lesson for a writer – never take an ‘and’ for granted. Published in 1964, this book emits a gravitational pull of nostalgia for a bygone world. A title can teach you something you didn’t know you didn’t know; then make you want to know more. Such is Edmund White’s The Flâneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris.

The back blurb tells me a flâneur is one who strolls about aimlessly, a lounger or a loafer (hence the type of shoe?). I tumble in love with the subtitle, partly for its alliterative ‘p’s, partly for the dissonance of warm-and-fuzzy (stroll) alongside hard-and-sharp (paradox). I’ve strolled in Paris but not contemplated the paradoxes. This book urges me to buy it, hop on a plane, and go stroll in said paradoxes – altogether well in excess of the price of the book. More reason, then, to buy it and live vicariously.

Some titles trick you by hopping inside your head, seeing the world momentarily through your eyes, and representing this emblematically in the title. This lends legitimacy to your ignorance while rewarding your curiosity, as with Why a Painting is Like a Pizza – a guide to modern art that allows you to find something ugly before you find it meaningful and that actively encourages you to interrogate the nature of art.

Others offer immediate comfort. I saw Bruno Bettelheim’s A Good Enough Parent when in the throes of baby-raising and in that instant of ‘phew!’, gave myself permission not to be perfect. Amazing what a load is lifted when the expectations are lowered. I’m convinced that Stanley Coren’s How to Talk Dog was titled with me in mind (linguist with new puppy). It made me pick it up and then it walked me briskly to the cashier. It’s an intelligent phrasebook – of Doggish, as distinct from doggerel – translating canine language into human terms. For example, a slow tail wag with tail at a moderate to low position means ‘don’t quite understand what’s happening but I am trying hard to get the message’.

I’m so thingy about titles that I derive great pleasure simply from browsing through them in publisher’s catalogues. I noticed one in the relatively new genre of poop-fiction: So Grotty! by J. A. Mawter, promising more than enough toilet humour to satisfy the apparently insatiable demand for same. At the other end of the seriousness continuum is the recent Learning to Speak Alzheimer’s – a title more than replete with meaning and sadness.

Certainly mystery is a factor in making a browser pick up one book and not another. Consider: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Reading Lolita in Teheran, Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, In Cuba I was a German Shepherd, Fierce Invalids from Hot Climates and Leaning Towards Infinity. The last, a friend tells me, apparently has nothing to do with leaning or infinity but has an entrancing nipple on the cover. An irony about titular allure is that it too, like parenting, can be good enough. You can flâneur through a bookshop, bypass the bookas – text, and browse those titles unfettered by material constraints.

Although you probably have less reason than some to look up ‘ruth’ in the dictionary, doing so can be a learning experience.

You’ll find it is an archaic common noun meaning ‘pity’, ‘mercy’ or ‘compassion’. It derives from the Middle English ‘rue’ (pity), which we still use for the odd curse, as in ‘you’ll rue the day you were born’. Granted, this is not heard a lot these days, probably because in a comparable circumstance we’re more likely to pull out a handgun than invoke the powers of a curse.

These days ‘ruth’ is mostly recognisable in ‘ruthless’. It’s rather sad, don’t you think, to be present only through negation? It wasn’t always so. Remember Biblical Ruth? She who worked the fields by day and spent nights sleeping at the foot of Boaz’s bed, waiting for him to make a move. Which he did, though not before she’d got through a lot of wheat. That story, told to me as a child, has left me grudgingly respectful of the unrapacious Boaz, guided as he was by ethics rather than opportunism.

Now, you will no doubt have noticed my ‘unrapacious’. There’s no such word, of course, but my meaning is pretty transparent, I bet. After all, rapacious is a hit-you-in-the-eye kind of word, and ‘un’ is the conventional semantic reverser. You don’t need a huge imaginative leap to place Boaz closer to the ‘New Man’ end, rather than the Genghis Khan end, of the pillaging and rampaging barometer.

As a reverse marker, ‘un’ is less than totally dependable. We can use it to reverse ‘happy’, ‘cooperative’, ‘lucky’, ‘sure’ and ‘realistic’ (among many more), but not ‘sad’, ‘solemn’, ‘serious’ and ‘savage’ (among others).

Verbs are equally unpredictable. We can uncage, unbutton, unbrace, unfasten and unbind, but we can’t ‘unbreak’ (even hearts), ‘uncalculate’, ‘unsteal’ or ‘unspeak’ (even Nixon). Some things, once done, cannot be undone. Then there are words where the verb is disallowed (‘unbreak’) but the related adjective works (‘unbroken’). Similarly, we have ‘uncensored’ but not ‘uncensor’, ‘unloved’ but not ‘unlove’, ‘unrivalled’ but not ‘unrival’. The suffixes ‘-ful’ and ‘-less’ have their own pattern. Take a noun (such as ‘hope’), add ‘-ful’ for plus quality or ‘-less’ for minus (‘hopeful/hopeless’). So too ‘useful/useless’, ‘cheerful/cheerless’, ‘remorseful/remorseless’, ‘mindful/mindless’ and thousands more.

But of course exceptions exist; indeed they thrive. A room may be windowless but not ‘windowful’. We can be limbless or limbed, but not ‘limbful’ (unless perhaps we’re particularly leggy). We have ‘awful’, but not ‘awless’, though there’s always ‘awesome’. One may be mournful but not ‘mournless’. We say ‘a handful’ of coins, but not ‘handless’, unless we’re speaking of an amputee, and then we’d probably search for a euphemism, like ‘manually challenged’. We have ‘shedful’ for a vague large-quantity marker but ‘shedless’ has little currency, except for a category of male persons deprived, perhaps because of apartment living, of the standard Australian solution to the testosterone-based need for a tool-storage place.

My father used to have great fun creatively adding ‘-fuls’ and ‘-lesses’ wherever he thought they might have something to offer. He’d add ‘-ful’ to an adjective like ‘patient’, making ‘patientful’, with the intention of creating a meaning of bonus-quality patience. Ironically, his foreign accent gave him privileges denied the native speaker. Oblivious to the twinkle in his eye, people would let such usages slide, probably thinking, ‘poor migrant, doesn’t know better’. Perhaps this biographical remnant accounts for my being inordinately bothered by the fact that the quality of compassion in ‘ruth’ is used today only to mark its absence. We’ve lost both ‘ruth’ and ‘ruthful’, no doubt casualties to the only-bad-news-is-newsworthy mindset. Granted, governments, armies and cyclones perform ruthless acts. But what about nuns in ruthful bids to save souls? Or researchers toiling ruthfully for cures? Or politicians seeking ruth for human rights?

Some say our words shape our perceptions, and without a word like ruthful we’d probably not recognise ruthfulness, even under our noses. Others say our words expand to accommodate our needs. Accordingly, the hill tribes of Papua New Guinea will develop their own words for ‘email’ and ‘download’ if and when the need arises. The logic here would have it that if we don’t have ruthful or ruth, it’s because we don’t need them, or because there’s not enough of the quality of ruth around to warrant its own word.

Now there’s a depressingful thought.