"Annie Choi wants to tell you a few things: She hates musical theater. She thinks sandwiches are boring. She likes camping, except for the outdoors part. She daydreams about cannibalism. At fifteen, her father made her read the entire car manual before allowing her to sit in the driver's seat. And she once chased down a man who stole her handbag ..."--

This book is for anyone seeking a laugh-out-loud read. Through hilariously funny, far-fetched escapades, a teenage girl recounts her high school years while, at the same time, reveals small-town life in the early sixties. This is a delightfully wacky and engaging romp back in time!

Slagdrop Presents America... You're Welcome! is the lovechild of blind jingoism and bullshit.

Poems from the urban female psyche.

This collection contains a selection of recent work on people’s production of figurative language (metaphoric, ironic, metonymic, hyperbolic, ...) and similarly of figurative expression in visual media and artefact design. The articles illuminate issues such as why and under what circumstances people produce figurative expression and how it is moulded by their aims. By focusing on production, the intention is to help stimulate more academic research on it and redress historically lower levels of published work on generation than on understanding of figurative expression. The contributions stretch across various academic disciplines—mainly psychology, cognitive linguistics and applied linguistics, but with a representation also of philosophy and artificial intelligence—and across different types of endeavour—theoretical investigation and model building, experimental studies, and applications focussed work (for instance, figurative expression in product design and online support groups). There is also a wide-ranging introductory chapter that touches on areas outside the scope of the contributed articles and discusses difficult issues such as a complex interplay of production and understanding.

In many respects the present volume differs from the most of those which have been issued by the Society; there is in it very little history, as commonly understood. The author, it is true, lived in a stirring time, and was himself an actor in some of the incidents which have shed a glory on our naval records; but his account of these is meagre and of little importance. The interest which attaches to his ‘Recollections’ is entirely personal and social; we have in them sketches roughly drawn, crude, inartistic, and perhaps on that account the more valuable, of the life of the time; of the men who were his companions in the berth, or the gunroom or the wardroom; on deck, in sport or in earnest. In all this, there is perhaps little that we did not know before in an otiose sort of way. We knew that the men of the time were often coarse in speech, rude in action; but it may be that the reality, as portrayed by Commander Gardner, exceeds anything that we had imagined. It seems to carry us back to the days of Roderick Random, and to suggest that there had been but small improvement since Smollett wrote his celebrated description. A closer examination will correct this impression; will convince us that there had, on the contrary, been a good deal of improvement; that the life was less hard, the manners less rude; and if the language does not show very much difference, it has to be considered that Smollett was writing for the public and Gardner was not; that Smollett’s dialogues are more or less literary, and Gardner’s are, for the most part, in the vernacular. Occasionally, indeed, the language has been modified, or its undue strength merely indicated by a ——; but where oaths and expletives formed such a large part of the conversational currency between intimates; when ‘son of a bitch’ was the usual equivalent of the modern ‘chappie’ or ‘Johnnie’ or ‘rotter’; when ‘damned’ was everywhere recognised as a most ordinary intensitive, and ‘damn your eyes’ meant simply ‘buck up,’ it has been felt that entirely to bowdlerise the narrative would be to present our readers with a very imperfect picture of the life of the day. Independent of the language, the most striking feature of the portraits is the universal drunkenness. It is mentioned as a thing too common to be considered a fault, though—if carried to excess—an amiable weakness, which no decent commanding officer would take serious notice of. Looking down the lists of old shipmates and messmates, the eye is necessarily caught by the frequency of such entries as ‘too fond of grog,’ ‘did not dislike grog,’ ‘passionately fond of grog,’ ‘a drunken Hun,’ a term of reprobation as a bully, rather than as a drunkard, ‘fond of gin grog,’ ‘mad from drink,’ ‘insane from drink,’ and so on, passim. For the officer of the watch to be drunk scarcely called for comment; it was only when, in addition to being drunk, he turned the captain out at midnight to save the ship, that he narrowly escaped being brought to a court martial; ‘but we interceded for him, and the business was looked over’ (p. 217).