But what is a «blurb»? It’s the wonderful word for the short text on the back cover of a book which serves to promote, describe and summarise its content.
This is the first blurb that ever there was. It was intended as a joke, which is why we ended up with a less than serious word for the thing.
This is the blurb on the back of Ray Bradbury’s brilliant dystopian novel about a time when books are burnt. Doesn’t it make you want to read the novel?
The book with the greatest blurb ever may be The Bad Bohemian. It’s so good I can’t bring myself to read the book itself for fear of it not living up to the wonderful and riotous blurb on the back cover:
Blurb is only one letter away from blur, the word for things that can’t be seen clearly. And that’s only one letter away from slur. As in ‘slurring your words’- speaking unclearly the way you do when drunk. Well, not you. You’re most likely one of those people capable of being eloquently inebriated. Either that or you never touch the stuff. Jaroslav Hašek, by contrast, probably did quite a bit of slurring in the blur that was his «bottle-strewn life».
So there you have it, another weird and wonderful word to be found in the beautiful mess that is the English language.
Academia de Inglés Robin 