Peter Bowler
Encyclopedia
Peter Bowler is an Australia
n lexicographer and author of The Superior Person's Book of Words, The Superior Person's Second Book of Weird and Wondrous Words, and The Superior Person's Third Book of Well-Bred Words. He specializes in esoteric, arcane, archaic, and otherwise unusual word
s, which he has catalogued humorously in his three books, along with "real-life" situations in which such words might come in handy.
A short biography, which amounts to two sentences, is printed on the inner back flap of each of his books: "Who exactly is Peter Bowler? On questioning, the author becomes noticeably tongue-tied, and indeed has been known to break down completely and admit to being just an easily confused fat man with a poor memory."
His books about words are published in the USA by David R Godine of Boston and in the UK by Bloomsbury of London. His other books have included: The True Believers; What a Way to Go; the crime novel Human Remains; The Creepy-Crawly (a book of verse for children) and Your Child From One to Ten (a manual for parents on child development). He has also written and edited books on emergency care and its theoretical medical foundations. One or another book in the Superior Person’s series has been in print at all times since 1979.
He lives near Brisbane in Australia with his wife Diane, and when not writing collects old 78rpm records, wind-up gramophones, and old English pewter.
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
n lexicographer and author of The Superior Person's Book of Words, The Superior Person's Second Book of Weird and Wondrous Words, and The Superior Person's Third Book of Well-Bred Words. He specializes in esoteric, arcane, archaic, and otherwise unusual word
Word
In language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content . This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own...
s, which he has catalogued humorously in his three books, along with "real-life" situations in which such words might come in handy.
A short biography, which amounts to two sentences, is printed on the inner back flap of each of his books: "Who exactly is Peter Bowler? On questioning, the author becomes noticeably tongue-tied, and indeed has been known to break down completely and admit to being just an easily confused fat man with a poor memory."
His books about words are published in the USA by David R Godine of Boston and in the UK by Bloomsbury of London. His other books have included: The True Believers; What a Way to Go; the crime novel Human Remains; The Creepy-Crawly (a book of verse for children) and Your Child From One to Ten (a manual for parents on child development). He has also written and edited books on emergency care and its theoretical medical foundations. One or another book in the Superior Person’s series has been in print at all times since 1979.
He lives near Brisbane in Australia with his wife Diane, and when not writing collects old 78rpm records, wind-up gramophones, and old English pewter.
Selected passages
- "Circumambagious, aAdjectiveIn grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....
. – Employing a roundabout or indirect manner of speech. Not as effective, perhaps, on the whole, as an aid to obfuscationObfuscationObfuscation is the hiding of intended meaning in communication, making communication confusing, wilfully ambiguous, and harder to interpret.- Background :Obfuscation may be used for many purposes...
, as the sesquipedalianism fostered by this book, always assuming, if you will forgiveForgivenessForgiveness is typically defined as the process of concluding resentment, indignation or anger as a result of a perceived offense, difference or mistake, or ceasing to demand punishment or restitution. The Oxford English Dictionary defines forgiveness as 'to grant free pardon and to give up all...
a somewhat JamesHenry JamesHenry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....
ian digressionDigressionDigression is a section of a composition or speech that is an intentional change of subject. In Classical rhetoric since Corax of Syracuse, especially in Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, the digression was a regular part of any oration or composition...
(Henry, that is to say, in contradistinction to P.D.), that obfuscation is in fact the objectiveObject (grammar)An object in grammar is part of a sentence, and often part of the predicate. It denotes somebody or something involved in the subject's "performance" of the verb. Basically, it is what or whom the verb is acting upon...
, and having in mind also that, setting aside the relative merits of the two different approaches toward that end, vis-a-vis each other, it can hardly be doubted that the employment of both together, as distinct from one or the other, must have a still greater obfuscatory, or perhaps more precisely, obscurantistObscurantismObscurantism is the practice of deliberately preventing the facts or the full details of some matter from becoming known. There are two, common, historical and intellectual, denotations: 1) restricting knowledge—opposition to the spread of knowledge, a policy of withholding knowledge from the...
, impact, a point well evidenced by the fact that this particular instance of circumambagiousness has, as I believe you will discover, successfully diverted your attention from the fact that nowhere in this admittedly now somewhat overlong sentenceSentence (linguistics)In the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language, and often defined to indicate a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that generally bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it...
is there, despite its superabundance of subsidiary clauses, a principal subjectSubject (grammar)The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e...
or verbVerbA verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...
."
Works
| Year | Title | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1979 | The Superior Person’s Little Book of Words | |
| 1983 | What a Way to Go! | |
| 1984 | The Annotated Onomasticon | |
| 1986 | The True Believers | |
| 1986 | Farvel & Tak! | |
| 1989 | Your Child From One to Ten | |
| 1991 | The Superior Person’s Second Little Book of Words | |
| 1996 | The Superior Person’s Great Big Book of Words | |
| 1998 | Human Remains | fiction |
| 2001 | The Superior Person’s Third Book of Well-bred Words | |
| 2005 | The Creepy-Crawly | verse |
| 2008 | The Superior Person’s Field Guide to Deceitful, Deceptive and Downright Dangerous Language | |
| 2009 | The Completely Superior Person’s Book of Words | |
| 2010 | The De Reszke Record | fiction |