New York Times book critic Dwight Garner is always worth reading. He has excellent judgment, he’s widely read, he’s always ready with an apt and toothsome quotation (in fact, he’s published a book of his favorite quotes), he comes up with great metaphors and similes, and, not least, he’s fond of somewhat obscure Not One-Off Britishisms.
His column in today’s paper has two of them. He quotes the author of the book he’s reviewing (Songbooks: The Literature of Popular Music) as describing novelist Jonathan Lethem as “the greatest used bookstore clerk of all time.” Garner: “Lethem’s eventual biographer should nick that title.”
Later he (kind of fondly) calls the book “an omnishambles.”
That’s what I call going beyond the usual “gobsmacked” and “spot-on.”
notoneoffbritishisms.com 
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