Good news for book publishing! Sometime Gawker hottie, Grub Street writer and heretofore-uncredited coiner of the term "douche" Daniel Maurer has sold his first literary work, Brocabulary, in what Publishers Marketplace would call a "very nice" deal (so between $50 and $100K.) What is this new addition to the canon, you ask? It’s a man-i-festo of dude talk and a dictionary of manly mots! You know, like douche. Also like: Guidon’t : 1. (n) a Guido-related faux-pas. 2. (exclamation) A command given to a Guido that he cease his Guido-related behavior. Or Doug Booty: A hail mary pass made at a woman despite the fact that your game is clearly about to be over. Or Power tool: Someone who has achieved power, wealth, or fame despite being a total tool. You get the idea.
A few thoughts occur to me:
The provisional subtitle of the book is "The New Man-i-festo of Dude Talk," which leads me to believe, solipsistically, that they wanted man-ifesto but noticed that we’ve already snapped up the URL man-ifesto.com, so they had to throw in an extra hyphen. Then again, there is a nice visual balance with the two hyphens that man-ifesto kind of lacks, so now I’m sort of envious.
I’m titillated by the word "brocabulary," because, well, I’m easy to titillate, but at the same time there’s something about it that reeks of yob-misogyny — that makes me think that the guy who’s writing the book is one of those former-nerds-with-something-to-prove types who, if things had gone a slightly different way, would be writing a book, and conducting seminars, on the art of the pick-up.
I can’t find quite enough info on Maurer to confirm this, but there’s some evidence that he’s more of a jobber and a low-rent Neal Pollack than anything else.
Then again, maybe I’m just jealous — $50-100,000 for inventing a clever word?!? What the fuck.
