Here at last

[George Thompson]

I requested some months ago that the library here buy the following philological study:
The fucktionary = Slownik wyrazen z fuck, by Maciej Widawski, Gdansk: Wydawn. Comprendo, 1994.
Evidently there were difficulties involved -- I recently asked one of the guys in the Acquisitions dept. to ask his grandmother in Warsaw to go to a bookstore and buy it for us -- but instead, it was got, it seems, from The Polish Bookstore in Ottawa, (polishbookstore.com).
Now that I have it before me, I wonder whether it was worth the effort.  It certainly requires a better command of Polish than mine to get the full benefit of it.  It's 221 pages, incluing a bibliography of dictionaries and studies.  The entries include definitions and (apparently) commentary in Polish, and are supported by quotations in English, mostly unsourced.  When a source is given -- David Mamet is cited, and James Jones, and others -- no work is specified, let alone a page reference.

I can't even boast that we are the only kid on our block to have the book, since it's at the NYPL.

I did succeed in astonishing the students who work in the department, and that's something, I suppose.

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998.