Are you up to the challenge?

    Now Karen Elizabeth Gordon has revised and enlarged her classic handbook with fuller explanations of the rules of punctuation, additional whimsical graphics, and further character development and drama -- all the while redeeming punctuation from the perils of boredom. For anyone who has despaired of opening a punctuation handbook (but whose sentences despair without one), THE NEW WELL TEMPERED SENTENCE will teach you clearly and simply where to place a comma and how to use an apostrophe. And as you master the elusive slashes, dots, and dashes that give expression to our most perplexing thoughts, you will find yourself in the grip of a bizarre and beguiling comedy of manners. Long-time fans will delight in the further intrigues of cover girl Loona, the duke and duchess, and the mysterious Rosie and Nimrod. The New Well-Tempered Sentence is sure to entertain while teaching you everything you want to know about punctuation. Never before has punctuation been so much fun!

    There, a bore is "a person who talks when you wish him to listen," and happiness is "an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another." This is the most comprehensive, authoritative edition ever of Ambrose Bierce’s satiric masterpiece. It renders obsolete all other versions that have appeared in the book’s ninety-year history.A virtual onslaught of acerbic, confrontational wordplay, The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary offers some 1,600 wickedly clever definitions to the vocabulary of everyday life. Little is sacred and few are safe, for Bierce targets just about any pursuit, from matrimony to immortality, that allows our willful failings and excesses to shine forth.This new edition is based on David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi’s exhaustive investigation into the book’s writing and publishing history. All of Bierce’s known satiric definitions are here, including previously uncollected, unpublished, and alternative entries. Definitions dropped from previous editions have been restored while nearly two hundred wrongly attributed to Bierce have been excised. For dedicated Bierce readers, an introduction and notes are also included.Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary is a classic that stands alongside the best work of satirists such as Twain, Mencken, and Thurber. This unabridged edition will be celebrated by humor fans and word lovers everywhere.

    Author Phil Cousineau takes us on a tour into the obscure territory of word origins with great erudition and endearing curiosity. The English poet W. H. Auden was once asked to teach a poetry class, and when 200 students applied to study with him, he only had room for 20 of them. When asked how he chose his students, he said he picked the ones who actually loved words. So too, with this book -- it takes a special wordcatcher to create a treasure chest of remarkable words and their origins, and any word lover will relish the stories that Cousineau has discovered.

    What do an Italian cardinal, a Connecticut blacksmith, and a German diplomat have in common with an MIT linguist, a Hungarian translator, and a Scottish church organist? They were all "hyperpolyglots," "language superlearners," or "massive multilinguals." In Babel No More, Michael Erard delves into the lives and minds of these intriguing individuals both past and present and discovers the upper limit of the human ability to learn, speak, and remember languages. Hyperpolyglots - people who, by one definition, can use six or more languages - are fascinating not simply because what they do is out of the ordinary. Rather, their accomplishments serve as a point of reference for the rest of us; in some ways they are what the author calls a gifted neural tribe, absorbing language for reasons, and with methods, that few people would emulate. But they are also marked by simple, if dogged, methods: the most prolific multilingual in history, Cardinal Mezzofanti, used flashcards. Taken together, their pursuits present a natural experiment into the limits and the nature of memory and language. Part scientific detective story, part travelogue, part valentine to anyone who's ever hoped to sprechen or parler something other than a mother tongue, Babel No More takes us all over the world to look at language learning in an entirely new way.

    certainly has, and after forty years of making a living using words in every medium, print or electronic, except greeting cards, he still can't get over his ABCs. In Alphabet Juice, he celebrates the electricity, the juju, the sonic and kinetic energies, of letters and their combinations. Blount does not prescribe proper English. The franchise he claims is "over the counter."Three and a half centuries ago, Thomas Blount produced Blount's Glossographia, the first dictionary to explore derivations of English words. This Blount's Glossographia takes that pursuit to other levels, from Proto-Indo-European roots to your epiglottis. It rejects the standard linguistic notion that the connection between words and their meanings is "arbitrary." Even the word arbitrary is shown to be no more arbitrary, at its root, than go-to guy or crackerjack. From sources as venerable as the OED (in which Blount finds an inconsistency, at whisk) and as fresh as Urbandictionary.com (to which Blount has contributed the number-one definition of alligator arm), and especially from the author's own wide-ranging experience, Alphabet Juice derives an organic take on language that is unlike, and more fun than, any other.

    This text uses place names to describe some of these meanings.

    Satirist Leland Gregory teaches us a lesson in historical hilarity with Stupid American History.From Columbus to George W. Bush (that's a lot of material, people), Leland leads us through American history's mythconceptions, exposing idiocy and inanity along the time line. He reeducates by informing us about myths. For example, Samuel Prescott actually was the guy to alert us that the British were coming and not that Paul Revere dude. Move over Colbert and Stewart; satire has finally found its rightful place in American history.Excerpt from the book:"John Tyler was on his knees playing marbles when he was informed that Benjamin Harrison had died and he was now president of the United States. At that time marbles was a very popular game for both children and grown-ups."For reasons still unknown, Texas congressman Thomas Lindsay Blanton, a Presbyterian Sunday school teacher and prohibitionist, inserted dirty words into the Congressional Record in 1921. His colleagues overwhelmingly censured him on October 24, 1921, by a vote of 293-0."

    Regular, irregular, and defective verbs are each given a full page, with principle parts and complete conjugations.

    Rolling Stone magazine has called songwriter Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields the Cole Porter of his generation; O, The Oprah Magazine has hailed cartoonist Roz Chast as the wryest pen since Dorothy Parker's. Together they have crafted a witty and unique book in celebration of two-letter words, focusing on the 101 such words that count in Scrabble. Featuring original four-line poems by Merritt and color illustrations by Chast, 101 Two-Letter Words covers familiar words (go, hi, no, ox) as well as obscure ones (ka, oe, qi, xu). With the dark wit and clever wordplay of Edward Gorey or Shel Silverstein, this book is sure to delight not just Scrabble players and crossword puzzle fanatics but also anyone in thrall to the weirdest corners of the English language."

     Marvel at the thief who steals electrical wires without shutting off the current. Gape at the lawnchair jockey who floats to a height of 16,000 feet suspended by helium balloons. Learn from the man who peers into a gasoline can using a cigarette lighter. All three -- and many more -- contend for Darwin Awards when their choices culminate in magnificent misadventures. These tales of trial and awe-inspiring error--verified by the author and endorsed by website readers--illustrate the ongoing saga of survival of the fittest in all its selective glory.

    It's going to be a lot harder than you think to pick out the BS. Each entry hides one well-crafted fib among a pair of unbelievable truths. And it's up to you to figure out what's fascinating and what's fabricated on everything from koala bears to Confucius to high-fructose corn syrup.Was Cleopatra the last Egyptian pharaoh?Can you really make diamonds out of tequila?Is the platypus actually poisonous?A flip of the page reveals whether you're right or wrong as well as more information on the true trivia—and why you might've fallen for the fake fact. You'll really need to know your sh*t if you plan on correctly calling bullsh*t.

    The co mpanion will interest tourists, students and business travel lers to Japan. '

    Little’s exploration of “word travel” includes:• Shona, a language lacking distinct words for “blue” or “green”• Why Icelandic speakers must decide if the numbers 1-4 are plural• Which language is the only one lacking verbs• Just what, exactly, the Swedish names of IKEA products meanFully illustrated with hilarious sidebars, Biting The Wax Tadpole also addresses classic cases of mistranslation. For example, when Chinese shopkeepers tried to find a phonetic written equivalent of Coca-Cola, one set of characters they chose were pronounced “ke-kou ke-la.” It sounded right, but it translated literally as “bite the wax tadpole.” Not quite what Coke had in mind, but in this off-kilter ode to the words of the world, it’s just another example of language taking you someplace interesting.

    GET D!RTYNext time you’re traveling or just chattin’ in Japanese with your friends, drop the textbook formality and bust out with expressions they never teach you in school, including:•Cool slang•Funny insults•Explicit sex terms•Raw swear wordsDirty Japanese teaches the casual expressions heard every day on the streets of Japan:What's up?Ossu?How's it hanging?Choshi doyo?I'm smashed.Beron beron ni nattekita.I love ginormous tits.Kyo'nyu daiskui.Wanna try a threesome?Yatte miyo ka sanpi?I gotta take a leak.Shonben shite.He's such an asshole.Aitsu wa kanji warui kara.