Peter Bowler

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This page is about the Australian lexicographer; for the historian of science, see Peter J. Bowler;

for the English environmental campaigner and country diarist, see Pete Bowler.

Peter Bowler is an Australian lexicographer and author of The Superior Person's Book of Words, The Superior Person's Second Book of Weird and Wondrous Words, and The Superior Person's Third Book of Well-Bred Words. He specializes in esoteric, arcane, archaic, and otherwise unusual words, which he has catalogued humorously in his three books, along with "real-life" situations in which such words might come in handy.

A short biography, which amounts to two sentences, is printed on the inner back flap of each of his books: "Who exactly is Peter Bowler? On questioning, the author becomes noticeably tongue-tied, and indeed has been known to break down completely and admit to being just an easily confused fat man with a poor memory."

His books about words are published in the USA by David R Godine of Boston and in the UK by Bloomsbury of London. His other books have included: The True Believers; What a Way to Go; the crime novel Human Remains; The Creepy-Crawly (a book of verse for children) and Your Child From One to Ten (a manual for parents on child development). He has also written and edited books on emergency care and its theoretical medical foundations. His next book on words and language is due for publication in 2007.

He lives near Brisbane in Australia with his wife Diane, and when not writing collects old 78rpm records, wind-up gramophones and old English pewter.

[edit] Selected passages

• "Circumambagious, a. - Employing a roundabout or indirect manner of speech. Not as effective, perhaps, on the whole, as an aid to obfuscation, as the sesquipedalianism fostered by this book, always assuming, if you will forgive a somewhat Jamesian digression (Henry, that is to say, in contradistinction to P.D.), that obfuscation is in fact the objective, and having in mind also that, setting aside the relative merits of the two different approaches toward that end, vis-a-vis each other, it can hardly be doubted that the employment of both together, as distinct from one or the other, must have a still greater obfuscatory, or perhaps more precisely, obscurantist, impact, a point well evidenced by the fact that this particular instance of circumambagiousness has, as I believe you will discover, successfully diverted your attention from the fact that nowhere in this admittedly now somewhat overlong sentence is there, despite its superabundance of subsidiary clauses, a principal subject or verb."