Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Boswellian #WordsOfLizdom

The Bloggess Jenny Lawson's book, Let's Pretend this Never Happened, is BYUCKing Boswellian Carly UP!!
Greetings from the Boswelliansphere

As you can see, we're all about punctuationally-motivated experimentation and novelomenclature--making up words!--in preparation for Wordy Weekend at Boswell:



Lizzie Skurnick is an author, columnist, blogger, and the founder and editor of Lizzie Skurnick Books, a publishing imprint that brings back stunning editions of 20th century young adult and teen classics. For this special event, she will lead the audience in a unique verbal wordplay game in the spirit of That Should Be a Word, her trenchantly witty compendium of indispensable new words derived from the popular New York Times Magazine feature of the same name. With 244 of Skurnick's wittiest wordplays arranged in ingenious diagrams detailing their interrelationships, That Should Be a Word features words that cover issues from the profound financial anxiety of a post-recession society ("bangst") to the hyper-vain celebrity circle that abstains from anything of import ("celebracy"), delving into all the most humorous--and maddening--aspects of life in the 21st century. 


Mary Norris draws from over three decades in The New Yorker's copy department for her debut Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, which includes wide-ranging and hilariously rendered examples (Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Moby-Dick, and The Simpsons) to address topics as diverse as gendered pronouns, the hierarchy of punctuation, and the diminishing power of the apostrophe, explaining why it's always "between you and me." Joining her in conversation about Between You & Me, lauded by Boswellian Daniel as "an education, an intellectual romance, and a delight, to go all Oxford comma on you," and Boswellian Todd as "a collection of writing-related ruminations...unstuffy, conversational while being correct," is beloved local legend Bonnie North of WUWM's Lake Effect

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No need to PRE-ARDOR: That Should Be a Word and Between You & Me are on Boswell's shelves right now!!
In the Book Candy section of the January 6, 2015 edition, Shelf Awareness ran a link to an article posted in BuzzFeed the previous day (written by staff writer Alex Alvarez), titled "23 Words for Book Lovers That Really Should Exist." Captivated by this idea, your brave and stalwart Boswellians sought to come up with words for some of them...and quickly turned to expert Lizzie Skurnick for help, choosing our favorites, riffing on some from the article in BuzzFeed, even coming up with a book-related phenomenon or two of our own! And Lizzie, creative sort that she is, came up with words for all of them!! 

Fifty shades of "What Did You Say?!" à lBINDAGE.
To give you a taste of what Wordy Weekend at Boswell will be like, here's our list and a few of the #WordsOfLizdom--as cleverly crafted and lovingly rendered GIF images of your very own Boswellians!!--that Lizzie Skurnick came up with for Boswell.

  • A word for dropping food on your book
  • A word for when someone insists that you read a book
  • A word for when you feel like the characters of the book are members of your family
  • A word for books that ALWAYS bring you to tears
  • "A word for the smell of a new book" (#1 from BuzzFeed)
  • "A word for the smell of an old book" (#2 from BuzzFeed)
  • "A word for not remembering whether something in a book happened to you...or you read it in a book" (#10 from BuzzFeed)
  • "A word for the totally unnecessary annoyed feeling you get when seeing a book you love reissued with a movie poster on it's cover" (#11 from BuzzFeed)
  • "A word for feeling such close kinship with an author that you feel they're writing just for you" (#14 from BuzzFeed)
Tweet your own witty wordplay to us (@boswellbooks--and don't forget @lizzieskurnick, @MaryNorrisTNY, and @Workmanpub) using the hashtag #WordsOfLizdom!! 

Dear Lizzie: Boswellian Mel is picking up what you're putting down here at Jezebel: she and Elizabeth George Speare's The Witch of Blackbird Pond are totally * SCROLLMATES.

* For this one, Lizzie also thinks KINDREAD would work just fine!