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The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense: A Guide for Edgy People

The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense: A Guide for Edgy People
By Ophelia Benson, Jeremy Stangroom

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Product Description

Two of Britain's leading cultural commentators provide a hilarious guide to the various trendy discourses that academics have churned out for decades. Covering such schools of thought as difference feminism, deconstruction, and the sociology of knowledge, the author reveals that clotted jargon, tortured syntax, and unreadable style hides the fact that nothing new is being said. This ironic guide offers an array of ludicrous, exaggerated, self-contradicting definitions and explanations of popular intellectual jargon, poking witty fun at postmodern theorists from Adorno to Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and arming the reader with enough knowledge to salt them into the conversation if ever trapped at a party with a crowd of trendy academics.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #349840 in Books
  • Published on: 2006-10-28
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 128 pages

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Not just a collection of easy quips and jokes...has a depth to it, as the best humour generally does."  —Norman Geras, author, Marx and Human Nature


"With wit and invention, Benson and Stangroom take us through the checklist argot that so often litters postmodern texts."  —Times Literary Supplement


"Benson and Stangroom have an excellent ear for the clichés of ordinary academic language."  —Times Higher Education Supplement

About the Author

Ophelia Benson runs an online cultural forum at www.butterfliesandwheels.com. She lives in Seattle. Jeremy Stangroom is the editor of The Philosopher's Magazine and a coeditor of What Philosophers Think. They are the coauthors of Why Truth Matters.

Customer Reviews

Inside jokes4
This is humor for the initiated. If you are familiar with (and scornful of) Theory, postmodernism, deconstruction, Derrida, etc., you'll get the jokes. If you're one of the uninitiated (like me), most of the jabs and puns will be baffling. I did some reading about the targets of the humor, after which many of the entries made more sense. But, as the saying goes, frogs and humor fare poorly upon dissection.

You'll understand some of the entries better if you read the authors' other book first, Why Truth Matters. That book also assumes some familiarity with the Theory, but it gives you a much better feel for the basis of the authors' derision.

Even if you don't understand all of the entries, you'll be able to chuckle knowingly when you hit on one you understand. It's great to be on the inside.

Funny and Frightening5
This book is only for those of us who are skeptical of PC and academic nonsense. If you are also, you will find this book very funny with its wry definitions of how to be Politically Correct, how to avoid making judgements, and how to deny that anything is true because everything is relative including this statement. You may miss some of the jokes, but the authors promise to explain them on their website. The frightening part is that some of us parents are paying over $30k per year for professors to teach this fashionable nonsense to our children.

Very funny, but only if you know what they are talking about.4
'The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense-A guide for edgy people' by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom. Is an excellent satire on postmodernist political correct thought. I strongly recommend this book for all university students, atleast in the humanities or non-science subjects. Hopefully with the help of this book they maybe to detect their lecturers indoctrination before they themselves swallow the 'fashionable nonsense' pill and it is too late. The kind of thinking that this book satirizes has trickled down onto high schools, where it harms and even wider audience. So High school students should read this as well.
My sole criticism of this book (for which I deducted one star) is that if one is not already familiar with the concepts (Who is Jacques Lacan for example) then some of the jokes are less than funny. Perhaps the author should put a serious explanation for these sorts of things at the end next time.