Booklist
Taking the long view of the historian, Ammer regards a collection such as hers as giving form to "the particularity of an era's attitude." A pointed example is drawn from the testimony of a young soldier pressed by her comrades to participate in harassment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Her response, when agreeing to join in, was "OK. Whatever." This example, along with several others, appears in the entry for whatever, which Ammer says is "one of the most recent additions to clichedom," noting, too, that it is used very loosely. Her own definition--"in any case; anything goes; as you wish"--is certainly adequate, though it hardly accounts for the word being sometimes "irksome, and even incendiary, as well as nonchalant." In this connection, she adduces the actor Russell Crowe's assault on a hotel clerk who uttered the word with a greater measure of disrespect than Crowe thought appropriate. (It's an absolute delight to find such matters brought up in discussing meaning and usage.) The thoroughness of this entry is typical of the whole, and the same thoroughness may be found in the indexing, which permits both phrasal and keyword searches. Recommended for all libraries wanting to keep their collection of English-language resources current. Harold Cordry
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