From Rain Taxi, a review of Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play by Jennifer DeVere Brody; and a review of The Extended Words: An Imaginary Dictionary by Sid Gershgoren. A review of The Glamour of Grammar: A Guide to the Magic and Mystery of Practical English by Roy Peter Clark. Verbed: Not every noun wants to stay that way. A review of The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time by Jeff Deck and Benjamin D. Herson (and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more). On word division: Can anyone explain how you "draise" "fun" — as in "fun-draising", and do we need an aristocratic urologist to explain a "pee-rage"? Click here: A field guide to English usage online. A not-so-secret guide to our lost language: Lexicographers hoard words — and wait to see if we take them up. When is a word not a word? When it doesn't make it into the dictionary. Rig talk: Jan Freeman on what the oil spill did to language. "I wrote 2U B4!": British Library shows up textspeak as soooo 19th century. The Oddest English Spellings: Anatoly Liberman on tier, tear (noun), tear (verb), tare, wear, weary, and other weird words. Largely gone from the funny pages but alive and well on the rear bumper of the car, the rebus is a visual puzzle that, in its various forms, encapsulates the history of alphabetic writing from ideograms (pictures designating concepts or things) to pictographs (pictures representing specific words or phrases) to phonograms (pictures representing specific sounds or series of sounds).
Attention college students: Bookforum will pay you $10 for every $16 subscription you sell. Sell 10 subscriptions and we'll double your money for a total of $200!
