With dry wit and a storyteller’s eye, Roache romps through the history and social meaning of colorful language.
A senior academic offers a tongue-in-cheek examination of why, how, and when we swear.
One might expect that an author who teaches philosophy at the University of London would be on the stuffy side, but Roache, host of the Academic Perfectionist podcast, is anything but dull. Her book is a lively examination of swearing in all its forms, and although it is often humorous, Roache also has serious points to make. Swearing is sometimes meant to be offensive, but much depends on the context. It can signal solidarity within a group or class, be used to emphasize a point and denote surprise, and have a cathartic quality that prevents disputes from escalating to violence. Brain scans suggest that swearing is intuitive and automatic rather than logical, an idea that fits its emotional basis. A surprising number of researchers have looked into this field, and Roache draws together their findings. She is mainly interested in swearing in the English language, and she traces the history of the key words and underlying concepts. There have been numerous attempts to censor swearing, but they have seldom worked, and there are terms that can be more offensive than a swear word, including racial slurs. The author disdains the use of asterisks when swear words are written since everyone will know what the word is anyway. Swearing was once seen as a lower-class phenomenon, but in recent decades, it has crossed socioeconomic and gender boundaries, to the point that it might have lost its power to shock and sting. Despite this, there are still some prohibitions. Swearing in front of children and from public figures is widely considered unacceptable. Those who are easily offended might want to avoid the book, but the rest of us will find it to be an informative, entertaining read.
With dry wit and a storyteller’s eye, Roache romps through the history and social meaning of colorful language.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9780190665067
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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