by Henry Beard and Roy McKie
Beard, a co-founder of National Lampoon, and McKie, who has illustrated Dr. Seuss books, have combined talents—cute definitions and mildly whacked-out drawings—on such previous dictionaries as Sailing and Cooking. They were accessible to kids and fun for adults, and so is this book. Clean up, for instance, is defined thus: "To take everything off the floor and put it away in a place where, in order to find anything, you have to take everything out and put it on the floor." Zebra is "a horse whose clothes were picked out by its mother." Politeness means "not saying to adults the kind of things they say to you." Beard is 43 and McKie 66, but they obviously haven't forgotten how they used to bamboozle the old folks back before they grew up and got all stodgy. (Workman, $10.95)
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