The Official Rules: 5,427 Laws, Principles, and Axioms to Help You Cope with Crises, Deadlines, Bad Luck, Rude Behavior, Red Tape, and Attacks by Inanimate Objects

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Courier Corporation, Nov 21, 2013 - Humor - 448 pages

This new, vastly expanded and enriched version of The Official Rules presents precisely 5,427 laws, principles, rules, proverbs, and aphorisms collected by Paul Dickson and the esteemed Fellows of the Murphy Center for the Codification of Human and Organizational Law. This often amusing, sometimes profound, collection of "official rules" was gathered one rule at a time over more than forty years from pundits, prophets, and everyday folks. It provides a means of coping in a world of human error and foibles where nothing is ever as simple as it seems, everything takes longer than expected, and inanimate objects possess an innate perversity. In sum it is rich testimony to the resiliency of the human spirit in facing the pitfalls and potholes of modern life. Though the vast majority of these life lessons were gathered in the 20th century, they are still timely and concise enough to fit inside the framework of a tweet. Recognizing the humor in adversity, these comic truths encourage acceptance of life's little imperfections. For example, Agnes Allen's timeless law: Almost anything is easier to get into than out of.

 

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About the author (2013)

Paul Dickson is a consulting editor for Dover and the author of over 50 books, many of them on language and slang. He has written introductions for most of the books in our baseball series and for all of the volumes in our NASA reprint series. His Baseball Is . . . appears on our current list.

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