Book Review: Liesl Schillinger’s Wordbirds: An Irreverent Lexicon for the 21st Century

Posted May 24, 2014 by Kathy Davie in Book Reviews

I received this book for free from in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Book Review: Liesl Schillinger’s Wordbirds: An Irreverent Lexicon for the 21st Century

Wordbirds: An Irreverent Lexicon for the 21st Century


by

Liesl Schillinger


non-fiction in Hardcover edition that was published by Simon and Schuster on October 15, 2013 and has 224 pages.

Explore it on Goodreads or Amazon


My Take

This is cute with a range of words and their definitions running the gamut from tràs practical to wild and crazy. And yes, there were a few that spoke to me and of me in this, lol, as well as some that relate to writers. Some of my favorites are baitface which seemed accurate in a roundabout way; anorexual spoke to me for its hypocrisy and ill-advised judgments; bloggerdudgeon which enjoys the turnabout-is-fair-play rule; and, lord knows I’ve done enough hollowgrams and I know too many impedimentors.

Oh, oh, and then the apocapic sounds like too many books I’ve been reading lately, *more laughter*. Thank god for Schillinger’s explanation of the droidian slip…here I thought it was just old age… Then there’s the new anocleansic, which involves more people than I want to acknowledge, and blotter which is an old, old plan.

At last kids have a term to explain their moms humiliating them! And the expense of going organic gets the warm, green, fuzzies!

Schillinger has broken her former posts up into several categories: fashion and style; politics, media, and celebrity; friends, frenemies, and fellow students; the office; the way we live now; wired world; romance; fasting, feasting, and carousing; domestic life; in transit; sports and leisure; and, the money pit.

Oh, LOL, Schillinger, I do love your mute point! And I do have it in line to do a Word Confusion on this one.

This is just a sample; you’ll find lots more to laugh over, roll your eyes at, and shake your head in dismayed wonder.

The Cover

The cover is a beautiful teal blue with silver frills with tiny flowers and leaves framing the title and the author’s name with silver birds in profile while the subtitle and the illustrator’s name is in white.

The title is a play on the focus on words plus the birds Zechel has drawn to illustrate the definitions and examples. It’s the Wordbirds that keep us in stitches.