Posted by ESC Got a new book: I Love It When You Talk Retro by Ralph Keyes (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2009). Interesting terms on Page 3: Retrotalk — allusions to past phenomena. Retroterms – verbal artifacts/verbal fossils that “hang around in our national conversation long after the topic they refer to has galloped …
Book Nook I
Part one of Ralph’s two-part appearance on Vick Mickunas’s Book Nook show can be heard by clicking on the link.
The Antioch Review
Euphemania: Show Me the Liquidity an excerpt by Ralph Keyes Euphemisms are an accurate barometer of changing attitudes. Verbal evasions put a spotlight on what most concerns human beings at any given time. This is as true today as it was when the Victorians considered legs too titillating to be mentioned by name. (Limbs was …
New York Journal of Books
Ralph Keyes begins his book, Euphemania: Our Love Affair with Euphemisms, with a rather dull example from another author’s book. This is unfortunate because Euphemania, a fascinating and current treatise on what Keyes calls “the age-old challenge of finding respectable euphemisms for dubious terms,” deserves a better introduction. Perhaps one of the best indications of …
NYT Talks Like Montgomery Burns
Columbia Journalism Review, May 11, 2009
THE RIGHT VERIFIER
From Amazon.com 5 stars L. Longfellow I could not have imagined a reference book that reads like a novel. Fortunately, Ralph Keyes could. An exceptional accomplishment. Layne Longfellow, Ph.D., Longfellow Reads Longfellow