This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset when it is mishandled. From George Orwell shunning the semicolon, to New Yorker editor Harold Ross's epic arguments with James Thurber over commas, this ... history makes a powerful case for the preservation of a system of printing conventions that is much too subtle to the mucked about with.-Dust jacket.

Mary Norris has spent more than three decades in The New Yorker's copy department, maintaining its celebrated high standards. Now she brings her vast experience, good cheer, and finely sharpened pencils to help the rest of us in a boisterous language book as full of life as it is of practical advice. Between You & Me features Norris's laugh-out-loud descriptions of some of the most common and vexing problems in spelling, punctuation, and usage comma...

This lecture looks at how we define and categorize words into parts of speech, and considers the fascinating ways in which words expand or move into new categories. Study how we characterize nouns, verbs, adverbs, and their syntax, and delineate the difference between a phrase, a clause, and a sentence.

THE TWELFTH EDITIONAmerica's Most Trusted Dictionary, Now More Comprehensive Than Ever Over 5,000 new words Fascinating word lists and histories, expert usage guidance, and more Expanded entries for the top 500 most frequently looked-up words More than 20,000 additional usage examples, including 10,000 new quotations More readable and visually appealing than ever before New words include: cold brew, farm-to-table, parklet, heat dome, rizz, gaslighting,...

Language-in its communicative and playful functions, its literary formations and its shifting meanings-is a perennially fascinating topic. C. S. Lewis's Studies in Words explores this fascination by taking a series of words and teasing out their connotations using examples from a vast range of English literature, recovering lost meanings and analyzing their functions. It doubles as an absorbing and entertaining study of verbal communication, its pleasures...

Southerners talk too slowly. New Yorkers are rude. New Englanders don't say much at all. Anybody who lives in the U.S. knows the clichés about how people in the various parts of the country handle the English language. American tongues is the first documentary to explore the impact of these linguistic attitudes in a fresh and exciting manner. For over ten years American tongues has entertained and educated audiences from the high school level on...

"Contains over 150,000 synonyms, antonyms, idiomatic equivalents, related words, and contrasted words in alphabetical arrangement."-- (source of summary not specified)