Discovering Ambrose Bierce

Your Liquid Ridiculous team recently came across a pair of radio broadcasts on the topic of Ambrose Bierce, a famous turn-of-the-previous-century linguist, pedant, and apparently general curmudgeon.  He's probably most famous for The Devil's Dictionary, a clever and sarcastic dictionary with, as an example, a definition of "love" that begins: "A temporary insanity curable by marriage."  In a special mini-podcast edition of the independent radio show "A Way With Words" -- which incidentally we highly recommend if your public radio station subscribes to it or you're of a podcasting bent -- one of the hosts interviewed an author who's written a new book about Bierce's writings, life, and character.  We hope to review it for the blog one day.  (We hope generally to begin writing germane book reviews, but that would require having time to read books.)  NPR also recently ran a quaint little story about quirky linguistic pet peeves, which naturally included some great material from Bierce.