Everything You Know About English Is Wrong | 
 enlarge | Author: Bill Brohaugh
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $12.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 270189
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.8 x 0.8
ISBN: 140221135X
Dewey Decimal Number: 422
EAN: 9781402211355
ASIN: 140221135X
Publication Date: May 1, 2008
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Product Description
I don't know how else to tell you this...everything you know about English is wrong.
"If you love language and the unvarnished truth, you'll love Everything You Know About English Is Wrong. You'll have fun because his lively, comedic, skeptical voice will speak to you from the pages of his word-bethumped book."
-Richard Lederer, author of Anguished English, Get Thee to a Punnery, and Word Wizard
Now that you know, it's time to, well, bite the mother tongue. William Brohaugh, former editor of Writer's Digest, will be your tour guide on this delightful journey through the English language, pointing out all the misconceptions about our wonderful-and wonderfully confusing-native tongue. Tackling words, letters, grammar and rules, no sacred cow remains untipped as Brohaugh reveals such fascinating and irreverent shockers as:
- If you figuratively climb the walls, you are agitated/frustrated/crazy. If you literally climb the walls, you are Spiderman.
- "Biting the Mother Tongue": English does not come from England.
- The word "queue" is the poster child of an English spelling rule so dominant we'll call it a dominatrix rule: "U must follow Q! Slave!"
- So much of our vocabulary comes from the classical languages-clearly, Greece, and not Grease, is the word, is the word, is the word.
-Emoticons: Unpleasant punctuational predictions
"Better plotted than a glossary, more riveting than a thesaurus, more filmable than a Harry Potter index-and that's just Brohaugh's footsnorts... Imean, feetsnotes...umfeetsneets?...good gravy I'mglad I'mjust a cartoonist."
-John Caldwell, one of Mad magazine's Usual Gang of Idiots
This book guarantees you'll never look at the English language the same way again-if you write, read or speak it, it just ain't possible to live without this tell-all guide. ("Ain't," incidentally, is not a bad word.)
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| Customer Reviews:
In English, It Ain't What You Know... May 15, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Beginning with his "English Delusionary" (a glossary of words created solely for this volume), Bill Brohaugh wants to make one thing perfectly clear: He spends a great deal of time considering irregularities in the English language and our repetitive abuse of them. This is not necessarily a bad thing because Brohaugh, the former editor of WRITER'S DIGEST, isn't cranky about usage issues. Rather, he's quite amused. Items that have rendered other linguists apoplectic, seem to merit his mirth. Double negatives? Great! Ending a sentence with a preposition? You betcha! Fond of your "ain't"? Have at it! Brohaugh embraces the colloquial while providing insights into just how we arrived at such a comfy kind of grammar. Employing ample pop culture references, he reminds us that "the broken are made to be rules" when it comes to the English language. The book provides a good counterpoint to Lynne Truss's anxiety-inducing EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES and will be enjoyed by everyone who can't quite admit to being amused by William Safire because they can't get past his politics. In other words, Brohaugh is funner.
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