“
A dictionary, even if it is unexpected, is always a book in which the word is the hero.
»It is with this formula that Jean-Loup Chiflet presents his book
Oxymore, mon amour!
, first published in 2011 and then this year in large format by Éditions Retrouvées.
The author and publisher of humor books around the French language continues his credo by confessing his "
addiction to the oddities of language [...] addicted to homophony
".
Driven by this passion for words, he immersed himself in an “
unexpected dictionary
”.
Like a patient and enamored archaeologist, he reveals these little artifices of the language that make it so charming.
Did you know that grammar and grimoire have the same etymology?
The last is even an alteration of the first, "
the grimoire designating grammar unintelligible to the vulgar
".
Another funny example, because laughter scrolls through his work, Jean-Loup Chiflet presents the letter "N", the proper names that have become common.
Thus we learn that the scale comes from the mathematician François Barrême, the belotte from François Belot or the quotes from the printer Guillaume.
Read alsoStyle figures: what is an oxymoron?
But the author does not stop at anecdotes. Its ambition is to make the sometimes impenetrable lines of the language readable, with a smile on her lips. Beyond the classics “
anacoluthe
”, “
paronomase
” and “
aposiopèse
”, he sets out to attack these figures of
speech
with sometimes barbaric names that we use without realizing it. Thus appear the isocolon, a sentence made up of several words of the same number of syllables ("
veni, vidi, vici
", for example) and hypocorism, speaking with diminutives ("
Jojo
", "
Jeannette
").
A love for the figure of speech which can be seen from the title of the book.
"
If I like the oxymoron enough to have wanted to offer it a place of choice, it is because I have always been attracted by this paradox which allows the effects of nonsense dear to my somewhat floating and ambiguous mind.
», Confesses Jean-Loup Chiflet.
The author is not at his first dictionary.
In 2012, he was already publishing
The Lovers of Humor Dictionary
at Plon
.
Jean-Loup Chiflet,
Oxymoron, my love!
Unexpected dictionary of the French language
, Editions recovered, 2021, 416 p., € 18.
