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.

As a student of English, you may sometimes find it difficult to know which word to use in a particular context. Or you may have used a particular word several times already in what you are writing, and so you want to use a different expression. Most thesauruses or dictionaries of synonyms are not as helpful as they might first appear: to read a list of synonyms for a certain word is helpful only as far as it goes. This dictionary, however, goes beyond...

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...

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

Online sensation Grammar Girl makes grammar fun and easy in this New York Times bestseller Are you stumped by split infinitives? Terrified of using "who" when a "whom" is called for? Do you avoid the words "affect" and "effect" altogether? Grammar Girl is here to help! Mignon Fogarty, a.k.a. Grammar Girl, is determined to wipe out bad grammar-but she's also determined to make the process as painless as possible. A couple of years ago, she created...

"A hare-larious picture book about bunnies features ME bunnies, YOU bunnies, US bunnies, WE bunnies and THEM bunnies. A group of bunnies come together and explore different pronouns"-- Provided by publisher.

"A captivating history" of the world's second most widely spoken language, from ancient dialect to digital slang (The Daily Telegraph).

What role did the Black Death play in the development of the English language? Where did "the real McCoy" come from? Why is Singlish on the rise? In what ways in language evolving in the age of the internet? How and why did "kirc" become "church"? And what's the difference between autumn...