Master verbalist Richard Lederer, America's "Wizard of Idiom" (Denver Post), presents a love letter to the most glorious of human achievements... Welcome to Richard Lederer's beguiling celebration of language -- of our ability to utter, write, and receive words. No purists need stop here. Mr. Lederer is no linguistic sheriff organizing posses to hunt down and string up language offenders. Instead, join him "In Praise of English," and discover why the tongue described in Shakespeare's day as "of small reatch" has become the most widely spoken language in history: English never rejects a word because of race, creed, or national origin. Did you know that jukebox comes from Gullah and canoe from Haitian Creole? Many of our greatest writers have invented words and bequeathed new expressions to our eveyday conversations. Can you imagine making up almost ten percent of our written vocabulary? Scholars now know that William Shakespeare did just that! He also points out the pitfalls and pratfalls of English. If a man mans a station, what does a woman do? In the "The Department of Redundancy Department," "Is English Prejudiced?" and other essays, Richard Lederer urges us not to abandon that which makes us human: the capacity to distinguish, discriminate, compare, and evaluate.

In Fractured English, bestselling author, Richard Lederer shares his collection of language gems, presented in his signature style-uncut, unpolished, and one hundred percent genuine. Fractured English is the only place you'll encounter this student's complaint: "I pass my testes. My grades should be hirer" or this headache of a headline: "Legislators Tax Brains to Cut Deficit." "Some people are bird-watchers. I watch word-botchers," declares the author as he expertly guides you through his world of loopy language. Enjoy more classic Ledrerer with Crazy English, a romp through the logic-boggling byways of our language, where you'll discover the names for phobias you didn't know you could have, the longest words in our dictionaries, and the shortest sentence containing every letter of our alphabet. You'll laugh as you learn that the English language is the only language in which you drive in a parkway and park in a driveway, and your nose can run and your feet can smell! Crazy English is perfect laugh-out-loud entertainment, guaranteed to keep you figuratively glued to your seat while you fall heels over head in love with our lunatic language.

Learn the origins of popular phrases in the English language through this exciting book of games perfect for language lovers. Do you know the connection between the expression A HARROWING EXPERIENCE and agriculture, between BY AND LARGE and sailing, between GET YOUR GOAT and horses, or between STEAL YOUR THUNDER and show business? You probably have heard the comparisons HAPPY AS A CLAM, SMART AS A WHIP, PLEASED AS PUNCH, DEAD AS A DOORNAIL—but have you ever wondered why a clam should be happy, a whip smart, punch pleased, and a doornail dead? Through the fifty games included in The Play of Words you'll discover the answers to these questions as well as hundreds of other semantic delights that repose in our marvelous English language.

After a multi-decade career of stimulating readers to appreciate and laugh at the glories and oddities of our English language, beloved language maven Richard Lederer has collected his very best and most popular pieces in Word Wizard . In this career-capping anthology the reader will find essays that enlighten, inspire, and tickle the funny bone. From his hilarious bloopers to his hymns of praise to the English language, these essays are the brightest gems of a storied career. Word Wizard includes a new introduction, prefaces for each essay, sprightly verse, and material never before published in Leader's language books. With classic chapters such as "The World According to Student Bloopers," "English Is a Crazy Language," and "The Case for Short Words," and shiny new essays such as "The Way We Word" and "Add Wealth to Your Vocabulary," Word Wizard is sure to delight language lovers and Lederer fans everywhere.

"Are we tired of hearing that fall is a season, sick of being offered fries and told about the latest movie? Yeah. Have we noticed the sly interpolation of Americanisms into our everyday speech? You betcha. And are we outraged? Hell, yes. But do we do anything? Too much hassle. Until now. In That's The Way It Crumbles Matthew Engel presents a call to arms against the linguistic impoverishment that happens when one language dominates another. With dismay and wry amusement, he traces the American invasion of our language from the early days of the New World, via the influence of Edison, the dance hall and the talkies, right up to the Apple and Microsoft-dominated present day, and explores the fate of other languages trying to fend off linguistic takeover bids. It is not the Americans' fault, more the result of their talent for innovation and our own indifference. He explains how America's cultural supremacy affects British gestures, celebrations and way of life, and how every paragraph and conversation includes words the British no longer even think of as Americanisms. Part battle cry, part love song, part elegy, this book celebrates the strange, the banal, the precious and the endangered parts of our uncommon common language"--Amazon.com

This charming ABC book from Maine artist Dahlov Ipcar contains an original illustration done especially for this edition, her first new children's book illustration in more than twenty years. The Maine wildlife and coastal scenes are near and dear to her heart, and this new book serves as a kind of love letter to her home state where she lived and worked for almost seventy-five years, where, as she writes, A is for animals, wild and free, and W is for woodlands of wonder for you and for me.

A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of" Fierce Attachments "and "The End of the Novel of Love"All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth.How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question "The Situation and the Story" asks--and answers. Taking us on a reading tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras.This book, which grew out of fifteen years teaching in MFA programs, is itself a model of the lucid inteligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of ninfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own.