She proclaims, in her delightfully urbane, witty, and very English way, that it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them as the wonderful and necessary things they are. Using examples from literature, history, neighborhood signage, and her own imagination, Truss shows how meaning is shaped by commas and apostrophes, and the hilarious consequences of punctuation gone awry.Featuring a foreword by Frank McCourt, and interspersed with a lively history of punctuation from the invention of the question mark in the time of Charlemagne to George Orwell shunning the semicolon, Eats, Shoots & Leaves makes a powerful case for the preservation of proper punctuation.

    Along the way, we find out about eyebrow flashes, whistling languages, how parents teach their children to speak, how politeness travels across languages and how the way we talk show not just how old we are but where we're from and even who we want to be.Whether looking at the whistle languages of the Canary Islands or describing the layout of the human throat, this landmark book will enrich the lives of everyone who reads it.

    In Words and Rules, Steven Pinker explains the mysteries of language by examining a single construction from a dozen viewpoints, proposing that the essence of language is a mental dictionary of memorized words, and a mental grammar of creative rules.

    You'll take a bird's-eye view of our beastly language, feast on a banquet of mushrooming food metaphors, and meet the self-reflecting Doctor Rotcod, destined to speak only in palindromes.

    Impress your boss with Occupational Latin (Lingua Latina Occupationi); sell your product with Sales Latin (Lingua Latina Mercatoria); flirt with your classics professor with Sensual Latin (Lingua Latina Libidinosa); look like the hipster you are with Pop-Cultural Latin (Lingua Latina Popularis); survive the holidays with Familial Latin (Lingua Latina Domestica) and Celebrational Latin (Lingua Latina Festiva). It's all here, whether you're a student of the language or just want to talk like one.From cocktail-party banter to climbing the corporate ladder to online dating, Latin for All Occasions features dozens of handy sections, including Las Vegas Latin, Latin for Golfers, Latin for Breakups, Latin for the Politically Correct, and much, much more. In one easy-to-use volume, National Lampoon founder Henry Beard presents hundreds of listings rendered in grammatically accurate classical Latin, with a foolproof pronunciation guide.Who says Latin is a dead language? From the comic genius who brought us X-Treme Latin comes Latin for All Occasions, guaranteed to help readers delight their friends, insult their enemies, and elevate the public discourse.

    Original.

    Lipton in the Books of Venery that were the constant study of anyone who aspired to the title of gentleman in the fifteenth century. When Mr. Lipton's painstaking research revealed that five hundred years ago the terms of venery had already been turned into the Game of Venery, he embarked on an odyssey that has given us a "slouch of models," a "shrivel of critics," an "unction of undertakers," a "blur of Impressionists," a "score of bachelors," and a "pocket of quarterbacks." This ultimate edition of An Exaltation of Larks is Mr. Lipton's brilliant answer to the assault on language and literacy in the last decades of the twentieth century. In it you will find more than 1,100 resurrected or newly minted contributions to that most endangered of all species, our language, in a setting of 250 witty, beautiful, and remarkably apt engravings.

    Learn to express your outrage in the words of such late, great Romans as Horace, Cicero, Virgil, and Ovid -- guys who could "dis" with class! Unapologetically quoting these famous Latin writers entirely out of context, the authors have compiled a witty, wicked little lexicon of insults and invective that will soon have you demeaning, defaming, and degrading your enemies with real "animus." 6 1/2" x 7 1/4". Black-and-white illustrations.

    Book by Goldman, Norma, Szymanski, Ladislas

    The bestselling grammar book has been updated and revised to include the latest and greatest on the basics and subtleties of English, and features a new chapter on the language of the Internet.

    The key system widely used to reference grammar in numerous Latin texts has been retained. Available also in hardcover.

    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!

    The thirty-five chapters describe the life of a Roman family in the 2nd century A.D., and culminate in readings from classical poets and Donatus's Ars Grammatica, the standard Latin school text for a millenium. Each chapter is divided into two or three lectiones (lessons) of a couple pages each followed by a grammar section, Grammatica Latina, and three exercises or Pensa. Hans Ørberg's impeccable latinity, humorous stories, and the Peer Lauritzen illustrations make this work a classic. The book includes a table of inflections, a Roman calendar, and a word index, Index vocabulorum.

    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.

    It includes a full account of Tolkien the linguist, as well as telling how to write all the languages, with guides to grammar and pronunciation, and a complete dictionary of the fourteen languages.Here is a book to deepen and enhance our enjoyment of those classics of Middle-earth, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.Ruth Noel teaches remedial and developmental reading in Riverside, California. She is the author of The Mythology of Middle-earth, on the relation between The Lord of the Rings and European myth in general. "The author is convincing and fascinating as she connects Tolkien's fantasies with the hallowed myths of other cultures." - Publishers Weekly