(Or Why Can’t Anybody Spell?) by Vivian Cook

This book ostensibly looks at the intricacies of the English language and the question of spelling reforms and suchlike. In reality, it’s awful; just a collection of lists. Strange lists at that; shops that adopt the ‘z in place of s’ approach; photos of stickers (Polite notice: no parking please) and photos of grafitti.

To be honest, although I read the whole book, it was more in the vain hope that something good would come. I still find two things hard to believe: 1) That a professor of applied linguistics could write such an awful scrapbook-style book; 2) That it’s still selling on Amazon for £9.89! It says a lot to me that they’re selling 73 used copies from £0.01. Thank God that I only wasted £1.99 on this dross.

Avoid.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.