The New Devil's Dictionary: Words from Idealistic Cynics

Much has been written in and about the English language. Ambrose Bierce was a particularly talented contributor to a hefty body of knowledge. Those of us who use English have come to appreciate, whether we study it or not, that our language is complex, beautiful, difficult, logical, straightforward, convoluted, evolving, rules based (but only to a point) and most of all, interesting in its unique ability to express the ideas, thoughts and feelings of humankind in a manner that others can understand.We hope you will enjoy our dictionary. Team writing is challenging for a number of reasons, both good and bad. Choosing to dwell on the positive, each team member comes with their own approaches, experiences and biases. Our team are world-worn cynics and that comes through in several places in our work. That being said, this effort has taught us a few things about ourselves and some things about our language. The extent to which English has been directly stolen from other languages was a surprise to us. The number of words which are alliterative and onomatopoeic was a surprise. The existence of subtle and not so subtle means of grouping clusters of words was interesting, such as, groups around the topic, groups of words united through prefixes and suffixes, and groups of words springing from the words stolen from others was a surprise. The historic legacy and the ability of the English language to incorporate technology and street ideas with equal easy goes well beyond a traditional dictionary and most extant languages.English is alive, well and thriving! Our approach has been haphazard, and sometimes just plain selfish as to which words have actually been included. However, we have arrived organically at a somewhat contorted body of work which we like to think is greater than the sum of its definitions. It is a collective “word portrait” of our interesting times. We shared many laughs in putting this together and hope that you will too!… Thanks to you Ambrose, for the inspiration for our expiration to go forward! We know that your humor, critical thinking, and candor will remain a legacy, perhaps even a treasure for another century.