Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Unputtadownable

I admit it, I'm hooked.

The Da Vinci code is positively, irrefutably, completely deliciously unputtadownable. The prose bumbles along happily, with dialogue so contrived that you'd think you'd want to scream at the pages, but you don't. You want to keep turning the pages, because the plot is so magestically intruiging that you know you won't be able to sleep for wondering. Every chapter ends leaving you wanting to know what's next.

Yesterday, a young librarian was reported missing having been last seen with a copy of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci code clutched to her chest. Police fear the book may have swallowed her, and hope she will be freed from its hollow belly in a couple of days.

Seriously, you're lucky I even got as far as the computer to compose this post. I can still see the book out of the corner of my eye...

Composing this post has forced upon me the realisation that the world is in need of a campaign to get unputtadownable in the Oxford English Dictionary. Well, any dictionary will do really, as long as it's a real one. You know, with pages. Commonly found in libraries and on my bookshelf.

Unputdownable may already be in the dictionary, but as I was writing the first paragraph above it was unputtadownable that tripped of the ends of my fingers and on to the screen without hesitation; unputdownable just feels contrived. Bland and rhythmless. Unputtadownable is as it should be, without a doubt. It doesn't have quite the same ring to it as bouncebackability, but it's getting there.

All it needs is for people to start using it. What is a dictionary but a record of how language is used? If you use it, they will come... or something.

Use it. Please? Let's be rid of the boring unputdownable forever. I just can't cope knowing there are people out there using a five syllable word when six is so much better.

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