Jacques Barzun's masterful translation proves that Flaubert's Dictionary of Accepted Ideas--an acid catalogue of the clichés of 19th-century France--is as rele

Spoken and written language is littered with cliches, but there are some usages - smug statements of secondhand opinion, grating nuggets of folk wisdom, toe-cur

“Dictionary, n: A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most usefu

Bouvard and Pécuchet are two Chaplinesque copy-clerks who meet on a park bench in Paris. Following an unexpected inheritance, they decide to give up their jobs