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Customer Reviews of Seven Types of Ambiguity

How to Read & Think Subtly
The prose of the author is delightful: it was originally published in 1930 when better authors had a genteel but sophisticated style. The author's original intention was to set forth a theory of metaphor by distinguishing and analyzing, as the title says, seven forms of (linguistic) ambiguity. He draws the examples on which he exercizes his probative skill mostly from great writers in the English language. But for those schooled after, say, the 1950s it is a wonderful exhortation to read, speak and write with more subtelty than is usually encountered. A corollary of the case he makes is that ambiguity--carefully crafted ambiguity, not ambiguity of the slothful kind--can be very powerful, but it presupposes a precision in reading and writing which is a precondition for well-crafted metaphor. As such it stands for OUR generations as an exhortation to lingusitic sophistication and an implicit disproof that "liberty" goes hand in hand with slovenliness. It certainly does make better readers out of those who go through his book.