Very Nice Ways to Say Very Bad Things: An Unusual Book of Euphemisms by Linda Berdoll was an interesting read. Berdoll's other writing is continuing doing sequels to Jane Austen classics, and while I haven't read them I'm given to understand that they are well written and in genre.
Very Nice Ways is a bird of a different feather. It is a primer for mockery and put downs, and supposed to allow us to tell people to their face what we really think of them. While cute, it doesn't do as good a job of this as we could hope. Berdoll gets caught up in the wordplay of writing the book, and the focus (or what I wish the focus was) suffers for it.
Finally, some of the chapters end up coming across as lists of euphemisms and synonyms for various bodily functions and substances, but such a list isn't as helpful as it could have been. A more perfected tome would have laid out some structural guides for insults, and perhaps set about to elucidate the situations under which various bodily functions are best put to use. Instead we have a book that can comfortably sit next to The Devil's Dictionary and be referred to perhaps as Satan's Synonyms or Beelzebub's Thesaurus.
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