But have you ever stopped to wonder where these peculiar terms actually came from? Most of those found in this book have their origins in the Medieval Books of Courtesy, among the earliest works to be published in this country. Despite originating as a form of social etiquette reserved for the gentry, many of these collective nouns have survived to become a curious feature of today's everyday language. This absorbing book tells the stories of these evocative phrases, many of which have stood the test of time and are still in use today. Entertaining, informative and fascinating, An Unkindness of Ravens is perfect for any history or language buff.

    Whether investigating the asterisk (*) and dagger (†)--which alternately illuminated and skewered heretical verses of the early Bible--or the at sign (@), which languished in obscurity for centuries until rescued by the Internet, Keith Houston draws on myriad sources to chart the life and times of these enigmatic squiggles, both exotic (¶) and everyday (&).From the Library of Alexandria to the halls of Bell Labs, figures as diverse as Charlemagne, Vladimir Nabokov, and George W. Bush cross paths with marks as obscure as the interrobang (‽) and as divisive as the dash (--). Ancient Roman graffiti, Venetian trading shorthand, Cold War double agents, and Madison Avenue round out an ever more diverse set of episodes, characters, and artifacts.Richly illustrated, ranging across time, typographies, and countries, Shady Characters will delight and entertain all who cherish the unpredictable and surprising in the writing life.

    And when that handbook is Rules for Writers, you can be sure the advice they find is practical and reliable—with help for composing and revising, writing arguments, analyzing texts, using grammar and punctuation correctly, and working with sources. In revising the eighth edition, Nancy Sommers has woven a new emphasis on reading critically throughout the first section of the handbook, introduced advice for analyzing multimodal texts, and added help for public speaking. New practical Writing Guides support students working through college assignments in a variety of genres. And new peer review advice helps students effectively comment on drafts and apply feedback to revisions of their own work. All of these improvements help student writers—but they also save you time and effort. You can draw from Rules for Writers for planning class discussions, conducting in-class workshops, and providing feedback on student work that they can easily apply. Rules for Writers even comes with a complete instructor’s manual, Teaching with Hacker Handbooks, with stepped-out lesson plans to customize and sample assignments, syllabi, and rubrics from your peers.

    Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader. Noted essayist Alberto Manguel moves from this essential moment to explore the 6000-year-old conversation between words and that magician without whom the book would be a lifeless object: the reader. Manguel lingers over reading as seduction, as rebellion, as obsession, and goes on to trace the never-before-told story of the reader's progress from clay tablet to scroll, codex to CD-ROM.

    These self-teaching methods help you remember and write by harnessing the power of the imagination.

    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 faults, danglers, "who" vs. "whom," "that" vs. "which," compound words, gender-neutral language—and her clear explanations of how to handle them. Down-to-earth and always open-minded, she draws on examples from Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and the Lord's Prayer, as well as from The Honeymooners, The Simpsons, David Foster Wallace, and Gillian Flynn. She takes us to see a copy of Noah Webster's groundbreaking Blue-Back Speller, on a quest to find out who put the hyphen in Moby-Dick, on a pilgrimage to the world's only pencil-sharpener museum, and inside the hallowed halls of The New Yorker and her work with such celebrated writers as Pauline Kael, Philip Roth, and George Saunders.Readers—and writers—will find in Norris neither a scold nor a softie but a wise and witty new friend in love with language and alive to the glories of its use in America, even in the age of autocorrect and spell-check. As Norris writes, "The dictionary is a wonderful thing, but you can't let it push you around."

    With clear text, appealing cartoons, and a focus on common errors and how to correct them, this little volume is a real gem that should find a permanent place with companies, universities, and anyone seeking a user-friendly guide to style and usage.

    Today, linguists use massive computer power--including the world's largest language databank, the Oxford Corpus, which contains more than two billion words--to determine for the first time definitively how the English language is used. From evidence contained in the gargantuan Oxford Corpus, Jeremy Butterfield here uncovers a wealth of fascinating facts about the English language. Where does our vocabulary come from? How do word meanings change? How is our language really being used? This entertaining book has the up-to-date and authoritative answers to all the key questions about our language. Butterfield takes a thorough look at the English language and exposes its peculiarities and penchants, its development and difficulties, revealing exactly how it operates. We learn, for instance, that we use language in chunks of words--as one linguist put it, "we know words by the company that they keep." For instance, the word quintessentially is joined half the time with a nationality--something is "quintessentially American" or "quintessentially British." Likewise, in comparing eccentric with quirky, the Corpus reveals that eccentric almost always appears in reference to people, as an "eccentric uncle," while quirky usually refers to the actions of people, as in "quirky behavior." Using such observations, Butterfield explains how dictionary makers decide which words to include, how they find definitions, and how the Corpus influences the process. Covering all areas of English, from spelling and idioms to the future of English, and with entertaining examples and useful charts throughout, this compelling and lively book will delight word lovers everywhere.

    The rules about how to use them are complicated, and have evolved haphazardly. Originally written as advice by a copywriter for designers – wont to insert and remove apostrophes at will, for visual effect – this is a light-hearted pocket-sized guide to getting the things right.Simon Griffin lets off steam so that we don’t have to, showing precisely why ‘Rhianna and Jennifer’s photos were all over the internet’ is quite different to ‘Rhianna’s and Jennifer’s photos’ or what words apostrophes are replacing in sentences such as ‘He’d like you to buy him some cocaine’, or ‘They’ve got it all on camera.’Elegantly produced, this is the perfect gift for any pedant, as well as an indispensable guide in all our moments of grammar-related frustration.

    Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world's 7.4 billion people in their mother tongues, you would need to know no fewer than twenty languages. He sets out to explore these top twenty world languages, which range from the familiar (French, Spanish) to the surprising (Malay, Javanese, Bengali). Babel whisks the reader on a delightful journey to every continent of the world, tracing how these world languages rose to greatness while others fell away and showing how speakers today handle the foibles of their mother tongues. Whether showcasing tongue-tying phonetics or elegant but complicated writing scripts, and mind-bending quirks of grammar, Babel vividly illustrates that mother tongues are like nations: each has its own customs and beliefs that seem as self-evident to those born into it as they are surprising to the outside world. Among many other things, Babel will teach you why modern Turks can't read books that are a mere 75 years old, what it means in practice for Russian and English to be relatives, and how Japanese developed separate "dialects" for men and women. Dorren lets you in on his personal trials and triumphs while studying Vietnamese in Hanoi, debunks ten widespread myths about Chinese characters, and discovers that Swahili became the lingua franca in a part of the world where people routinely speak three or more languages. Witty, fascinating and utterly compelling, Babel will change the way you look at and listen to the world and how it speaks.

    The Student's Book contains an introduction to the different modules of the exam together with an explanation of the different IELTS question types and how to approach them. The inclusion of annotated keys and tapescripts for each test makes the book ideal for students working partly or entirely on their own. The Audio CDs contain listening material carefully chosen to reflect the reality of the exam in terms of timing, format and the types of speaker and accent used.

    Here is the easiest way toLearn HindiKnow HindiUnderstand HindiRead HindiSpeak HindiWrite HindiAndTo Converse in HindiThrough English

    The language employed is free from heavy technicalities, and grammar itself is arranged in a succession of inter-dependent chapters, each accompanied by exercises in Hebrew - English and English - Hebrew. Vocabularies and tables are also included, and irregular verbs are rationalized philologically. The grammar has been planned to introduce the student as quickly as possible to a working knowledge of Classical Hebrew.The first edition was published in 1939. This second edition repairs small omissions of reference and includes other corrections of a fairly minor kind.

    This surprising compendium of 1,000 facts about words, language and etymology is here to inspire your curiosity and delight in discovery. In Word Drops, you can delve into a smattering of unexpected connections and weird juxtapositions, stumble upon a new or remarkable word, or learn of many a bizarre etymological quirk or tall tale.- Did you know that the bowl made by cupping your hands together is called a gowpen?- And speaking of bowls, the earliest known reference to bowling in English dates from 1555, when bowling alleys were banned by an Act of Parliament.- And that ties in nicely with the fact that the English called the Germans 'Alleymen' during the First World War.- But in Navajo, Germany is called Béésh Bich'ahii Bikéyah-or 'metal cap-wearer land'.Word Drops is a language fact book unlike any other, its linguistic tidbits all falling together into one long interconnected chain just like the example above with each fact neatly 'dropping' into place beside the next.What's more, throughout, footnotes are used to give some informative and intriguing background to some of the most bizarre facts, covering everything from traditional Inuit games to the origin of the Bellini cocktail, from the precise length of one 'jiffy' to what the Romans thought hoopoe birds ate, and from what to expect on a night out with Dr Johnson to Samuel Pepys's cure for a hangover. Want to know the longest palindrome in Morse code, or who The Great Masticator was? Curious to know what Norwegian steam is, or what a jäääär is? The answers are all here.For all of the logofascinated among us, this is an immensely pleasurable and unpredictable collection that is guaranteed to raise eyebrows (the literal meaning, incidentally, of supercilious).'Very jolly and all fascinating stuff. I'm sure it will solve a lot of people's Christmas present problems. Or it certainly should do.' -- Jonathon Green, lexicographer & author of Green's Dictionary of Slang'Fantastic' -- Moose Allain'If words were calories, this book would have you breaking the scales. To support my outrageous claim I refer you to urban legends which assert that certain brands of savoury snacks have 'something in them' which makes the brain crave more and more until the whole packet is gone. Whatever that something is, Paul Anthony Jones has imbibed plenty of it before compiling this endearing little book.' -- blogger Richard Littledale'For the bookish, the wordists, the nerdists, the swots... Paul Anthony Jones has compiled you the most absorbing and fascinating dip-in tome you will find all year ... Word Drops is very much a book to dip in and out of. It's a series of endless (but linked) words, coupled to their origins, meanings and a quantity of footnotes so great that they would put even David Foster Wallace to shame [...] Word Drops is a nerdist's paradise. An intricately researched and elegantly put together collection of wordy nuggets. I challenge you to flick through the book, open it at any page and not find something worth sharing with someone else.' --blogger MadamJ-Mo'It's hard to imagine anyone not being charmed by this breezy medley of self-contained yet interconnected miscellany. Once you pick up the string, you'll be tempted to keep pulling till you reach the end, and how quickly that takes may depend chiefly on how often you stop to share its contents with a neighbour.' -- blogger Stan Carey'Joy for the language-addicted!' -- Ian McMillan, Radio Presenter, Writer, Man About Town'A succinct, charming assemblage of unusual words' -- Greg Jenner, author of A Million Years in a Day'Brilliant for anyone interested in the effervescent oddness of English' --Stig Abell, Managing Editor, The Sun

    Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern. We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, as Harry Frankfurt writes, "we have no theory."Frankfurt, one of the world's most influential moral philosophers, attempts to build such a theory here. With his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity, psychological insight, and wry humor, Frankfurt proceeds by exploring how bullshit and the related concept of humbug are distinct from lying. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all.Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.