Wordy books - Bite-sized aids to writing and speaking are all the rage, but Annalisa Barbieri feels short-changed by the latest crop

Is it my imagination, or are books getting shorter? There seems to be a vogue for books that list all manner of useless miscellany, but make their authors a heap of money. I am very upset that I didn't think of this myself, instead of being old-fashioned enough to attempt to join up facts by way of sentences. It is particularly funny when the snack-attack approach is applied to books about language, words and syntax - an approach which, thanks to Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves, is now more fashionable than any dress by Diane von Furstenberg.

Of the four new wordy books that have recently launched themselves into that precious spot by the till point, two are truly awful: lazy, patronising, content-poor, dismissive. Vivian Cook's Accomodating Brocolli in the Cemetary: or why can't anybody spell? (Profile, £9.99) has to be the book with the most annoying title ever. It got rite on my tits. First, it perpetuates the very problem it seeks to solve: when the thickos in society (a group to which Cole apparently thinks we all belong) see the cover, they will think - presuming they can read - that this is how you actually spell "accomodating", "brocolli" and "cemetary". Second, that subtitle: what an assumption! You would have thought that conclusions would be the last things a man called Vivian would jump to.

Accomodating Brocolli is also a bit of a mess as a book. It is very much one of those dip-in-and-out books. While that is fine for the Guinness Book of Records, from a professor of applied linguistics (as is Cook, at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne), we deserve something more nourishing. It may have seemed like a good idea at the outset, but then Cole seems to have run out of steam. Accomodating Brocolli is filled with stuff for which, quite frankly, I'd be insulted to have paid a tenner. "How to decode number plates" is one such illuminating example. "Given some imagination, any number can resemble one or more letters," it continues. There follows a list of examples - how the figure "7", for instance, can be used in place of a T: as in LUS7Y. Talk about page-filler! The introduction, which runs to four tiny pages, is the most (in fact, the only) rewarding part of the book. The rest looks like something Cole knocked out in a few lunchtimes.

Henry Beard's X-treme Latin: all the Latin you need to know for surviving the 21st century (Headline, £9.99) is another waste of time. Modern phrases are translated so that people with no concept of ancient languages can say things such as "Wassup" and "You'll never eat lunch in this town again" in Latin. If this book were a film, it would go straight to video. I simply can't waste any more of my own words on describing it.

I was just starting to lose all hope when I picked up The Superior Person's Third Book of Words by Peter Bowler (Bloomsbury, £9.99). I'd also lost all sense of irony by this point, so the title irritated me. But despite this and my very negative frame of mind, I started to warm to it. Here at last was a proper book. It appears that Bowler actually spent some time writing it, as if finally he was obliged to leave out material. It is divided up alphabetically and each entry gives you a real word, but one that isn't in everyday usage. You not only learn what the word means, but there are snippets here and there; anecdotes; a bit of history. It makes you think, and you may feel your mind gently expand. Isn't this the whole point of books?

I so much wanted to like Don Watson's Gobbledygook: how cliches, sludge and management-speak are strangling our public language (Atlantic Books, £12.99), really I did. It is well-observed, valid, informed. It has actual sentences. It looks at the often meaningless tripe served up by politicians, phone companies, employers, corporations, all of whom trade in language that is often nonsensical and insincere. It shows how even news reports are now distilled into flowery, soap-opera lingo. Oh, bring back Richard Baker. Yet my eyes kept glazing over. And even though it wasn't written in a moany way, I found it a little like sitting next to an uncle who complains about the state of the world. By the end, I was thinking: "Get pissed, Don. Do some drugs." That is what books about words do to you, after a while. And yet it is entirely my failing, because I think Gobbledygook will eventually prove its worth as a comment on our times.

Still, "wordy" books do make you think of words. Several sprang to mind after reading these. In the case of Cook and Beard, one word in particular: bonfire. Best plaice for 'em.

Annalisa Barbieri's book on menswear will be published next year by Atlantic

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