Customer Reviews

The Dimwit's Dictionary: More Than 5,000 Overused Words and Phrases and Alternatives to Them

5 star:		(2)
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I love this book. It's a great reference for writers. My kids use this book, and I've found them going through it on several occasions. If you're a writer, you need to purchase this book. It gives a freshness to vocabulary and it's very sensible and comprehensible.

Though I've been writing professionally for more than twenty-five years, I'm having fun reading random entries in The Dimwit's Dictionary: 5,000 Overused Words and Phrases and Alternatives to Them, and its companion volume, The Dictionary of Concise Writing: 10,000 Alternatives to Wordy Phrases, because I need the occasional expert opinion (suspect superlative!) because my prose can suddenly and without warning (a wretched redundancy!) go overboard (a moribund metaphor!) and basically (overworked word!) commit egregious errors (an inescapable pair!) and even lapse into what is really and truly (infantile phrase!) as dead as a dodo (insipid simile!). -- Bill Kent, award-winning journalist and author of the six books

This is not a book that most people would sit down and read as I did, but it is a great and interesting reference! -- Stephanie L. Roberts, Joseph-Beth Booksellers

Your Dimwit's Dictionary has helped me become much more critical of how I write and speak. Thank You, Mr. Fiske! Your work is original because there is no other work which categorizes overused phrases and cliches, and offers concise alternatives. Your title, Dimwit's Dictionary, masks the precision and true noble purpose of your book: to regain a sensitivity to our language so that we may express our feelings and thoughts more accurately and deeply, and become more self-aware as human beings. -- Bullwinkle495

This selection was not nearly as entertaining or helpful as I suspected it would be from the reviews I read prior to purchasing. Was quite disappointed with the content.