While it's not likely to put the trusty old OED out of commission, the curmudgeonly A Devil's Dictionary of Business contains enough A-Z wit and snippets of fact to make it a mind-enriching browse, not just a gag to hide from your CEO. (“CEO: . . . As a class these men—and they are, in overwhelming numbers, male—vaguely correspond in modern American life to the nineteenth-century English squirearchy or the knight merchant class in Republican Rome.”) Von Hoffman, a columnist for the New York Observer and author of books, plays, and even an opera libretto, defines himself as “a Pulitzer prize-losing author . . . with a long and bumpy career in journalism.” The self-deprecation is a fine match for a dictionary that skewers the often self-serious world of business.
A Devil's Dictionary's subtitle sums up the contents well: Monkey Business; High Finance and Low; Money, the Making, Losing, and Printing Thereof; Commerce; Trade; Clever Tricks; Tours de Force; Globalism and Globaloney.
What you'll also find are mini-entries starting with abacus (“an energy-efficient office calculator”) and ending with Zukor (for Adolph, the Paramount chief who practically invented the studio star system and brought vertical integration to Hollywood). In between are standard business terms cleverly interpreted and succinct bios of business-minded individuals both famous and infamous. George Eastman merits an admiring entry: He built an empire by popularizing photography yet generously and sometimes anonymously gave money away. On the other hand, Horatio Alger of rags-to-riches fame, we are told, “was no Horatio Alger.”
So spend some time with A Devil's Dictionary, but not during work hours or you might find yourself pink-slipped (“fired, sacked, rusticated, laid off, discharged, dehired, made redundant . . . Why are there so many words for being pink-slipped and so few for being hired?”).
- Martha Lagace