Where do our everyday words come from? The bagel you eat for breakfast, the bumf you have to wade through at the office, and the bus that takes you home again: we use these words without thinking about their origins or how their meanings have changed over time. Simon Horobin takes the reader on a journey through a typical day, showing how the words we use to describe routine activities - getting up, going to work, eating meals - have surprisingly...

Join Little Pim and friends as they count fun objects - from ladybugs to lollipops. Children will learn more than 60 Chinese words and phrases for use in counting!

A style manual for English speakers on both sides of the Atlantic identifies the common mistakes and correct usage of everything from dangling participles to transitive verbs.

This lecture looks at how we define and categorize words into parts of speech, and considers the fascinating ways in which words expand or move into new categories. Study how we characterize nouns, verbs, adverbs, and their syntax, and delineate the difference between a phrase, a clause, and a sentence.

The word bitch conjures many images for many people, but it is most often meant to describe an unpleasant woman. Even before its usage to mean a female canine, bitch didnt refer to gender at allit originated as a gender-neutral word meaning genitalia. A perfectly innocuous word devolving into a female insult is the case for tons more terms, including hussy which simply meant house wife or slut, which meant an untidy person and was also used to describe...

Southerners talk too slowly. New Yorkers are rude. New Englanders don't say much at all. Anybody who lives in the U.S. knows the clichés about how people in the various parts of the country handle the English language. American tongues is the first documentary to explore the impact of these linguistic attitudes in a fresh and exciting manner. For over ten years American tongues has entertained and educated audiences from the high school level on...

Curious George's antics illustrate a variety of opposites, including forward and backward, wet and dry, and awake and asleep.

Charts the rise and fall of this infamous punctuation mark, which for years was the trendiest one in the world of letters. But in the nineteenth century, as grammar books became all the rage, the rules of how we use language became both stricter and more confusing, with the semicolon a prime example. Watson reveals how traditional grammer rules make us less successful at communication with each other than we might think. She argues that even the most...

In this expanded and updated edition of Woe Is I, former editor at The New York Times Book Review Patricia T. O'Conner unties the knottiest grammar tangles with the same insight and humor that have charmed and enlightened readers of previous editions for years. With fresh insights into the rights, wrongs, and maybes of English grammar and usage, O'Conner offers in Woe Is I down-to-earth explanations and plain-English solutions to the language mysteries...