Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Better Than Great: A Plenitudinous Compendium of Wallopingly Fresh Superlatives
    Better Than Great: A Plenitudinous Compendium of Wallopingly Fresh Superlatives
    Better Than Great: A Plenitudinous Compendium of Wallopingly Fresh Superlatives
    Ebook326 pages1 hour

    Better Than Great: A Plenitudinous Compendium of Wallopingly Fresh Superlatives

    By Arthur Plotnik

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A veritable "tko of terminology," Better Than Great is the essential guide for describing the extraordinary — the must have reference for anyone wishing to rise above tired superlatives. Deft praise encourages others to feel as we do, share our enthusiasms. It rewards deserving objects of admiration. It persuades people to take certain actions. It sells things. Sadly, in this "age of awesome," our words and phrases of acclaim are exhausted, all but impotent. Even so, we find ourselves defaulting to such habitual choices as good, great, and terrific, or substitute the weary synonyms that tuble our of a thesaurus — superb, marvelous, outstanding, and the like. The piling on of intensifers such as the now-silly "super," only makes matters worse and negative modifiers render our common parlance nearly tragic. Until now. Arthur Plotnik, the wunderkind of word-wonks is, without mincing, proffering a well knit wellspring of worthy and wondrous words to rescue our worn-down usage. Plotnik is both hella AND hecka up to the task of rescuing the English language and offers readers the chance to never be at a loss for words!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherViva Editions
    Release dateJul 12, 2011
    ISBN9781573446815
    Better Than Great: A Plenitudinous Compendium of Wallopingly Fresh Superlatives
    Author

    Arthur Plotnik

    Arthur Plotnik (1937 - August 28, 2020) was a photographer, journalist, author and librarian, known for being the editor of American Libraries magazine for fifteen years. Plotnik worked for the American Library Association for over twenty years.

    Related to Better Than Great

    Related ebooks

    Vocabulary For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      What Physics Can Teach Us About Writing Fiction

      Mar 6, 2018

      Sometimes writing fiction feels to me like that oft-used image of a godlike creator: the man pulling the strings of the marionette, orchestrating each fine movement from above the stage. One string might be character, another plot, a third setting, a

      6 min read

    • Article

      Subplots Aren’t Secondary

      Jun 19, 2019

      Subplots Aren’t Secondary
      6 min read

    • Article

      All About The Pitch

      Aug 8, 2022

      All About The Pitch
      2 min read

    • Article

      Bookish

      May 21, 2019

      There’s no one right way to live a writing life (unless, of course, you never write a word). But how does one start being a writer? Who’s allowed to call themselves a “writer,” anyway? And beyond grammar and syntax, what does a person need to know be

      1 min read

    • Article

      Movement and Flow

      May 10, 2019

      A FEW YEARS AGO my mother had a phase in which every three or four months something would short in her heart or brain, and she’d slump to the floor. Whatever did this left no trace; we guessed some kind of seizure. By the time I’d find her in the eme

      11 min read

    • Article

      The First Five Pages

      Jan 7, 2021

      The First Five Pages
      5 min read

    • Article

      The State Of It

      Sep 12, 2021

      The State Of It
      6 min read

    • Article

      Rules With A Velvet Glove

      Feb 28, 2021

      Rules With A Velvet Glove
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Writer As Public Figure vs. The Writer Who Actually Writes

      Feb 27, 2017

      I’m supposed to be writing a speech about my new novel, The White City. It’s a March morning, no sun. I’m standing by my secretary desk. I’ve shut the doors to the rest of the apartment and have been on the verge of sitting down to begin, but each ti

      12 min read

    • Article

      Writing Prompts and Exercises

      Feb 14, 2018

      Suggested Reading: A Primer for Poets & Readers of Poetry (W. W. Norton, February 2018) by Gregory Orr The author of a dozen books of poetry as well as three books about poetry, including Poetry as Survival (University of Georgia Press, 2002), Orr de

      2 min read

    • Article

      Humble Words Organized Beautifully: Ward Farnsworth on Style

      Aug 19, 2020

      Farnsworth's philosophy of composition is wonderfully anarchic when compared to the partisans of prescription who dominate the writing classroom and the style-guide racket. The post Humble Words Organized Beautifully: Ward Farnsworth on Style appeare

      12 min read

    • Article

      The Dark Side of Awe

      Jan 29, 2024

      The Dark Side of Awe
      10 min read

    • Article

      An Ode to My Thesaurus

      Jun 10, 2022

      An Ode to My Thesaurus
      1 min read

    • Article

      I Can’t Stand These Words Anymore

      Dec 30, 2020

      I’ve spent my life immersed in language, but this relationship, like all relationships, is fraught.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Intro

      Apr 3, 2019

      Intro
      5 min read

    • Article

      Seeing Sense

      Oct 7, 2021

      Seeing Sense
      6 min read

    • Article

      Mud Month

      Dec 12, 2019

      Mud Month
      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Better Than Great

    4/5

    3 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Better than great deals with the problem of over-used words. Tired of great, unbelievable, and sublime? This book will provide creative and sometimes strange alternatives you won’t find in your thesaurus. Plotnik deals with the general problem of praise inflation. Not everything can be great or unbelievable. “Approaching some two billion appearances in a web search, it certainly has lost whatever specialty it had. If two billion things are special, what’s left to be ordinary?” P. 4It often reminds me of the Princess Bride, “Inconceivable!” “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.” It may sound good to exclaim and heave importance on whatever you are doing, but a recalibration using this book may give your statements more impact. The author even provides his own version of a thesaurus to help and some concepts that help create your own phrasing.The book covers 15 categories: GreatSublimePhysically Affecting, Mentally, Emotionally, or Spirtually AffectingBeautifulJoy-givingLargeExceptionalIntenseDeliciousTrendyCoolWicked CoolForcefulChallenging belief or expressionI also enjoyed how to create your own superlatives:Hyperbole: mind incinerating; it puts your atoms in orbitPersonification: eats great for breakfast; reality on a toot; what great aspires toLitotes (understatement): not exactly nothing; hardly insignificantGermanism: lock-me-up-and-throw-away-the-key-gorgeous; trim-sail-and-batten-down-the-hatchesMetaphor: a tarantella on the tongue; a fun house; mastondonic; El DoradoEnallage (shifting a word’s normal grammatical role): great served hot; an eruption of fabulous; a hangarful of happy.Oxy-moron: damnably good, distressingly handsomeAlliteration: Pillar to post perfectIrony (opposite meaning): the illest, way sickGenerally the book helps a writer think outside of the box. When stuck, a typical thesaurus can just make your work sounds like the episode of Friends where Joey uses one creating a ridiculous document. However, using this book too much can make you sound old-fashioned, strange, or like Virginia Woolf. However, the book drastically changed how I think about word choice. Precision and specificity shows that you are truly paying attention to what someone is saying and how you are responding. It gives the feeling that I am more engaged in what is going on instead of merely dismissing something as awesome or great. This book is definitely something to have handy and place next to your thesaurus the next time you get stuck
    • 5/5
      Any words I might use to describe just how brilliantly adroit this book is will pale in comparison to the sheer amount of options this book has made available to me. The book is arranged into several different categories for easy use and gives histories on some of the most popular superlatives. I think I would have to study Better Than Great for a few weeks before I can truly use all these words in place of my too overused go-to's like amazing and excellent. A definite must have for anyone in any kind of literary field or anyone who loves words of all kinds.I received this book as part of the GoodReads Giveaway.
    • 4/5
      Over a career, author and editor Plotnik has urged writers to be more exciting and engaging with words. Now regarding superlatives, he writes, “We find ourselves defaulting to such habitual choices as good, great, and terrific, or substituting the weary synonyms that tumble out of a thesaurus...” And then we have to doctor them up by underlining, italicizing, CAPITALIZing and punc.tu.ating!So here he compiles 6000 “wallopingly fresh” adjectives, adverbs and multi-word expressions. They’re lively and imaginative, with a palpable pop-culture influence and mostly suited to writing that’s energetic not formal. Their organization is not typical-thesaurus alphabetical but rather in chapters by evocative intent, for example:• degree of acclaim, e.g. great (“seize-the-day special”) vs sublime (“nirvanic”) vs exceptional (“certified rare”);• physical/ mental/ emotional/ spiritual effect (“blistering,” “emotional eggbeater,” “aneurism-inducingly funny”);• beauty or gastronomy (“Halle Berry 2.0,” “noshalicious”);• size/ intensity (“hangar-sized,” “Wagnerian”); and• degrees of cool and wicked cool (“cool in high-def,” “cold”).All lists include a range from vintage terms to modern to ultra-trendy. Appendices include txt-ready abbreviations and a bibliography lists additional online and print sources.As a reference work, it’s difficult to use; it was only in digging deeply for this review that I began to meaningfully differentiate among the chapter categories. And there are hundreds of expressions in each, not something to browse in a moment of need. Still, I agree that language needs freshening, so I'm following the approach Plotnik suggests in an appendix -- to compile a starter set of fresh words I'd actually use (he supplies one) and begin to get comfortable using them.(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)

    Book preview

    Better Than Great - Arthur Plotnik

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1