We all know the basics of punctuation. Or do we? A look at most neighborhood signage tells a different story. Through sloppy usage and low standards on the internet, in email, and now text messages, we have made proper punctuation an endangered species. In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, former editor Lynne Truss dares to say, 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...

Covers the history of language from its beginnings to the explosion of English as a global language in the twentieth century.

Presents animals acting out the verbs made from their names, including hogs hogging, slugs slugging, and other creatures demonstrating homographs, words with different meanings that are spelled and pronounced the same.

"An unconventional guide to the English language drawn from the cross-country adventures of an itinerant grammarian."-- "When Jovin first walked outside her Manhattan apartment building and set up a folding table with a Grammar Table sign, it took about thirty seconds to get her first visitor. Everyone had a question for her. Jovin soon took it on the road, traveling across the US to answer questions from anyone who uses words in this world. Here...

Finally there's a word for it: Fidgital -excessively checking one's devices. Martyrmony -staying married out of duty. Author of the highly popular “That Should Be a Word” feature in the New York Times Magazine, Lizzie Skurnick delights word lovers with razor-sharp social commentary delivered via clever neologisms. That Should Be a Word is a compendium of 244 of Skurnick's wittiest wordplays-more than half of them new-arranged in ingenious diagrams...

"Monsters such as zombies, werewolves, and ghouls explain basic rules of grammar, including correct punctuation, appropriate word choices, and contractions"--

A funny, erudite, and provocative exploration of puns, the people who make them, and this derided wordplay's remarkable impact on history. The pun is commonly dismissed as the lowest form of wit, and punsters are often unpopular for their obsessive wordplay; but Pollack shows that such attitudes are relatively recent developments. He skillfully weaves together stories and evidence from history, brain science, pop culture, literature, anthropology,...

Drawings show an alphabet of young victims and how they died.

"Introduces adjectives and adverbs as parts of speech through the telling of an original story"--

"Ever wondered what the Mandarin word for platypus translates to? Probably not, but it's "duck mouth beast." And there's more where that came from, thanks to Adam Sharp's Euphemisms That Get on My You-Know-Whats, a collection of fascinating, hilarious, and brilliantly odd lists. This book covers just about everything you never knew you didn't know, from the noises that animals make around the world to titles of movies that sound dirty but aren't-and...