{"product_id":"i-m-leaving-you-simon-you-disgust-me-book-willie-donaldson-9780304365753","title":"I'm Leaving You, Simon -  You Disgust Me","description":"Spoken and written language is littered with cliches, but there are some usages - smug statements of secondhand opinion, grating nuggets of folk wisdom, toe-curling verbal flourishes of the would-be authoritative - that go beyond the bounds of cliche to enter more desperate linguistic territory. We encounter these verbal horrors every day of our lives - in conversations overheard on tube, train and bus and at suburban dinner parties, in the fictional dialogues of TV drama - and even in the glib formulations of TV sports commentators. They are disparate in nature - but have one thing in common: they all represent desperate attempts on the part of the speaker to persuade the listener that certainty of language mirrors certainty of thought and intellect, to project a verbal front of decidedness, authority and knowledge. Willie Donaldson has turned his finely tuned satirical ear to these verbal inanities to create a unique, offbeat and entirely hilarious dictionary of cringemaking Islingtonian phrasemaking.But the twist is this: lurking behind the A-Z facade is a dramatis personae of gabbling middle-class archetypes, including the Simon of the title - a Canonbury-based wine importer - and his overwrought partner, Susan, a university academic. Their excruciating dialogues - conversational nightmares of pat phrases, glib opinion and conjugal bitchiness played out in the fictional context of a Barnsbury tapas bar named the Goya - are brilliantly captured by the author, and make this most individual of books a candidate for humour title of the year.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49563009614097,"sku":"GOR001147535","price":13.3,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51323416510737,"sku":"CIN0304365750VG","price":13.2,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53495843094801,"sku":"GOR001962995","price":10.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0304365750.jpg?v=1751071019","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/products\/i-m-leaving-you-simon-you-disgust-me-book-willie-donaldson-9780304365753","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}