Today's Word of the Day is Deliciate:

Deliciate

De*li"ci*ate\, v. t. To delight one's self; to indulge in feasting; to revel. [Obs.]

Don’t be afraid to be a fool. Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. Saying yes leads to knowledge. "Yes" is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say yes.

- Stephen Colbert

Today's word of the day is Snollygoster:

Snollygoster

n.   Slang
One, especially a politician, who is guided by personal advantage rather than by consistent, respectable principles.

...why did we wait for any thing?--why not seize the pleasure at once?--How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!

- Emma by Jane Austen

Jane Austen inspires two very different reactions within me. 

While I'm reading her books, I find them tedious and rather obnoxious.  Spending so much time in the minutiae and social mores of the upper class of an uptight society - whilst the rest of the country experienced terrible problems with the rise of the industrial revolution - it's a bit reminiscent of the popular, pretty girl in high school bitching about how she can be alone...even in a crowd (which may be why I still hate Clueless - itself based on Austen's Emma).

And yet - as with most things in this life, a good teacher can make all the difference.  For I found, under the genius tutelage of the beautiful & brilliant Professor Priscilla Gilman, that there were multiple levels to Austen's work.  Metaphors, figurative language and whole characters created as a means of commenting on the very society and cultural norms I found so detestable.

Reading Austen was tedious and arduous to me - but thinking about her work was exciting and revelatory.  Enter Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls, which isn't a complete 180 on my previous experience with Austen, but was very close to it.

PPZ:DOD (for brevity sake) is the prequel to Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, although this book is written by Steve Hockensmith, not Grahame-Smith.  And while the previous entry in the series was a reworking and interweaving of Austen's text with Grahame-Smith's own injection of zombie action, this tale isn't fettered by Austen's plots, allowing Hockensmith to become much more creative.

Sometimes such freedom can be dangerous, if not outright dreadful (some pun intended).  Without the structure provided by Austen's work, it would be easy to see how PPZ:DOD could go off the rails.  However, Hockensmith has crafted a fun tale with plenty of (nerdy) genre shout-outs and perhaps even a certain level of profundity, though not at the expense of his entertaining book.  If Grahame-Smith's Pride & Prejudice & Zombies is Romero's Dawn of the Dead, a novel entry that helps redefine a genre while constantly providing some sort of metaphor, then consider PPZ:DOD more like Shaun of the Dead - highly entertaining and amusing revisionist romp, with plenty of geeky allusions and meta-textual moments, and perhaps a slight dipping of its toe into social commentary.  Heck, there's even discussion in PPZ:DOD about using "the zed word."

More review after the jump, along with a chance to win FABULOUS prizes!

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Today's word of the day is Laetificant:

Laetificant

pertaining to a medicine that makes one feel happy or stimulated

Thom tried to think of someone who had saved the world and felt suddenly the world was short of world-saving heroes.  Perhaps saving the world was impossible unless you were the fellow who refused to press the big red button when the time came.  There were millions of heroes, each saving a very small part of the world.

- Couch by Benjamin Parzybok

Today's word of the day is Abnormous:

Abnormous

Abnormal; irregular; misshapen

You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.

- Dorothy Parker's answer when asked to use the word horticulture during a game of Can-You-Give-Me-A-Sentence?

Song: "Last Dance" by Donna Summer

The Event: Working at Country Club for a Summer

For one summer, I worked in the kitchen of a Country Club in my native land of Cape Cod.  Mainly I worked for the catering staff, being a server at different functions.  Their biggest functions that occurred with the most regularity were weddings – handling about two or three every weekend. 

The first one I worked was a bit of a disaster as I was unfamiliar with the giant trays we used and had to smile while hot au jus slalomed off the plates, down the tray and finally settling onto a nice spot on underneath my collar. 

It was a harried night that I was looking forward to being over when my supervisor suddenly perked up.  “Ah, it’s ‘Last Dance’, it’s almost over.”  I had no idea what he was talking about, but he said that at 90% of the weddings he worked, this was the last song. 

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Today's word of the day is Mundungus:

Rubbish, refuse

I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance. That is my religion, and every day I am sorely, grossly, heinously and deeply offended, wounded, mortified and injured by a thousand different blasphemies against it. When the fundamental canons of truth, honesty, compassion and decency are hourly assaulted by fatuous bishops, pompous, illiberal and ignorant priests, politicians and prelates, sanctimonious censors, self-appointed moralists and busy-bodies, what recourse of ancient laws have I? None whatever. Nor would I ask for any. For unlike these blistering imbeciles my belief in my religion is strong and I know that lies will always fail and indecency and intolerance will always perish.

-Stephen Fry

Today's word of the day is "Interrobang":

Interrobang

-noun

a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question.

Childhood, at its best, is a perpetual adventure, in the truest sense of that overtaxed word: a setting forth into trackless lands that might have come to existence the instant before you first laid eyes on them. 

- Michael Chabon