Unputdownable

I like that word.  That’s why I think English packs a more effective punch in a lot of situations.

Brazilian dude

Now that I clicked the link, I find that it’s application is completely unrelated to what I thought it would be.

I rendered it, in my language-mind, as un-"put down"-able… As if to say the person or thing could not be criticized in a negative way.

To my surprise, it meant that the item (or, theoretically, person) was so attention-getting (-capturing?) as to be impossible to let go.

-Tim

I’m afraid I didn’t find The Da Vinci Code unputdownable in either sense.  :(

Geoff Pullum summed up my feelings beautifully in his article on the Language Log site. For example:

Brown’s writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad. ... I slogged through 454 pages of this syntactic swill, and it never gets much better.

Why didn’t Geoff put it down (in the sense of stop reading)? Because London Heathrow is a long way from San Francisco International…

Ed