THE DISHEVELED DICTIONARY: A Curious Caper...

Karen Elizabeth Gordon, whose quirky cult classics “The Deluxe Transitive Vampire” and “The New Well-Tempered Sentence” established her as the Edward Gorey of pop grammarians, is back with two more gleefully gothic books about language. “The Disheveled Dictionary” offers an eclectic collection of the author’s favorite words, while “Torn Wings and Faux Pas” tackles the tricky problems of usage, style and other grammatical bugaboos.

Fans of Gordon’s earlier work will recognize many of the curious characters cavorting about these pages, including baby vampires, dazed debutantes and love-starved contraltos, as well as Costanza Zermattress, Too-Too LaBlanca and other denizens of the far-flung lands of Azuriko, Trajikistan and Blegue. Seductions and trysts proceed apace, gargoyles guzzle, orgies are planned, mysterious items are locked into drawers, cowboys shimmy into lingerie and nymphs wax their legs: all the better to demonstrate the lusty vitality of English and the grammatical principles the author rightly regards not as knuckle-rapping rules but as useful tools for communicating with precision and panache.

“The Disheveled Dictionary” celebrates what Gordon calls “the music of language, the sound and sensuality of words, the rhythms and cadences they embrace, affecting us on several levels at once.” The book opens with appearances by two of Gordon’s many pseudonymous characters: Yolanta, who admonishes us to “come into these sentences and get into their drift,” and Jonquil Mapp, who, in “Finding Your Way in This Book,” suggests that though we may proceed from A to Z, we are also welcome to “stray, amble, alight where [we] please.”

Whimsically illustrated, this dictionary is actually just a sampling of words that Gordon has known and loved: from “abrogate” to “wunderkind.” Each comes with a brief definition, an example of its use in a sentence or two and, only occasionally, its etymology.

No doubt readers will find many of these words familiar, including “juggernaut,” “antidote,” “laconic,” “demure,” “brouhaha” and “hirsute.” Other words may be less well-known, such as “louche” (which describes something shady or dubious, from French for “blind in one eye”), “oubliette” (a dungeon, from the French for “to forget”), “coruscation” (a gleam, glint, sparkle, glitter) and the onomatopoeic “cachinnate” (to laugh loudly or convulsively). There are also “cellar door” (which Edgar Allan Poe considered the most mellifluous expression in English) and “ensellure,” a word whose absence from most English dictionaries is regrettable, considering that it’s a handy French term for the concave curve of a woman’s back.

As usual, the chief delight in Gordon’s work is not so much the information she imparts; there are far more copious and thorough dictionaries of curious words and stylebooks more comprehensive. Rather, it is in watching as she rubs words together to conjure wildly imaginative and cleverly suggestive sentences. Unlike typical dictionaries, which mine the great classics for their examples of popular usage, Gordon writes her own.

To demonstrate the potential uses of “sybaritic,” she tantalizes with: “And so the two sybaritic septuagenarians stripped down to their Strumpfhosen and sank into the sumptuous (but waterless) tub--well, the young puppy of a clerk didn’t know whether to avert his gaze or climb in with them, just to clinch the sale.” For “plaudit,” she offers: “As a sophomore, she’d been a participant in a beauty queen contest and walked off with plaudits and a battery-lit tiara that was rechargeable, bright enough to read by, and grew thorns when she suspired.”

Indeed, language lovers who pick up this book hoping to significantly expand their vocabulary may be disappointed because these words seem chosen mainly so that Gordon can have her way with them. Still, it’s entertaining to see how she puts familiar ones to ingenious use and shows their potential to prance about in a sentence, to dazzle and surprise. Give her “expurgated,” and she produces: “We expurgated prudishly all the manuscripts that fell into our hands and combined the offensive segments into a bold new work.” For “prodigal:” “The bosom of his family was not the soft landing he’d longed for; a VCR now wore his mother’s apron (he was wearing his silver lame prodigal sundress) and played him flashbacks of his feckless, squandered twenties.” Then there’s “pudenda,” which derives from an old word for “shame” and can apply to the external genitals of either sex: “ ‘Am I crushing your pudenda?,’ she asked, fluffing up the space conjoining them, settling her weight over the chair’s hairy forearm, and lapping up the droplets of pleasure still reflected in two of his eyes.”

Meanwhile, “Torn Wings and Faux Pas” is surely the steamiest stylebook ever to sit on a reference shelf. As Gordon puts it, “The book itself is an orgy, in fact--an orgy of orthography, shifting positions, inter-species fraternizing, naughtiness given safe conduct by stylistic panache and grammatical gravitas.” Her intent, she says, is to demonstrate “the thrill of writing adventurously, with raffish precision and lucid volupte.” Gordon works within the structure of a traditional stylebook, describing the differences between “if” and “whether,” “onto” and “on to” and those perennial vexations, “who” and “whom.” But it is in its examples of usage that her book comes alive. In describing the difference between “inimical” and “inimitable,” Gordon writes: “The generalissimo couldn’t count on the mercenaries’ being inimical enough to wreak the havoc on which he was so intent,” while “The climate in southern Lavukistan is inimical to hot flashers: that’s why she’s rented a pavilion for her holidays in fair blue Azuriko.”

To assist in this effort, Gordon calls upon an array of invented grammarians, all of whom she claims to have met when making a guest appearance on a television show called “Up Your Eponym.” She fashions names for these authorities with Dickensian delight (Vargas Scronx, Natty Ampersand) and profiles them in brief biographical sketches at the outset. Some readers may find these characters’ presence more confusing than helpful. One biographical sketch begins: “Cram Fossilblast had a prehistoric early childhood, spent the third grade looking at his class through the window, as the teacher locked him out for monosyllabic rough language and pugnacious demeanor toward the teacher’s pet (a castrated tomcat named Albion), then caught up with Western Civilization reluctantly in a seventh-grade morphology class (speaking of morphs, he is a mesomorph with a crash-helmet cranium and does he ever have taut muscles--and prose--without even trying; his principles are floppier, which is why he’s a favorite of mine).” Another opens with: “Drat Siltlow crawled out of the primal ooze in the late forties, his parents both heroin addicts, great musicians (cembalo, sax), father a descendant of a Northumbrian clan responsible for a nineteenth-century archeological hoax, mother a vaudevillain’s out-of-wedlock child raised by three maiden aunts on candy and the occasional possum in the Appalachian hills--till she joined her mother in St. Louis--which is where this doomed and talented pair created their first and only child.” At such times, Gordon’s book feels a little like “ ‘The Elements of Style’ Meets ‘Confessions of an Opium Eater.’ ”

But bear with her. Gordon’s advice about grammar and usage is sound, and just look at the fun she has righting misplaced modifiers, dispelling confusion about spelling and, most important, showing how syntactical precision makes for better writing. She delineates the difference between such words as “torturous” and “tortuous” (the former is painful, the latter merely twisted), “enormousness” and “enormity” (one refers to size, the other to unspeakable horror, monstrous deeds) and explains why sometimes “different than” is preferable to “different from,” as in “This honeymoon is different than I imagined it would be.”

Particularly instructive are the occasions when we get to watch Gordon grooming various sentences and paragraphs to make them look their best. For example, when “Carbonating their muscles with cheap champagne and caterwauling as they rolled on the floor, the birthday became a bacchanalian bazaar” gets changed to “With the girls caterwauling, carbonating their muscles with cheap champagne, and rolling on the floor, the birthday became a bacchanalian bazaar,” it becomes clear why the participial phrase in the first sentence shouldn’t be left to dangle.

The real problem with this sensuous yet sensible stylebook is the happy risk that readers who consult it may be lured into the labyrinth of Gordon’s witty imagination and forget what they were looking up in the first place.