Shea, Ammon
Summary: "The author of Reading the OED presents an eye-opening look at language "mistakes" and how they came to be accepted as correct-or not. English is a glorious mess of a language, cobbled together from a wide variety of sources and syntaxes, and changing over time with popular usage. Many of the words and usages we embrace as standard and correct today were at first considered slang, impolite, or...
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Publisher / Publication Date: 2014
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 428 SHEPetras, Kathryn
Summary: "An entertaining and informative guide to the most common 150 words even smart people use incorrectly, along with pithy forays into their fascinating etymologies and tangled histories of use and misuse"--
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Publisher / Publication Date: Ten Speed Press 2018
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 428.1 PETDickson, Paul.
Summary: "William Shakespeare's written vocabulary consisted of 17,245 words, including hundreds that were coined or popularized by him. Some of the words never went further than their appearance in his plays, but others--like bedazzled, hurry, critical, and anchovy--are essential parts of our standard vocabulary today. Many other famous and lesser-known writers have contributed to the popular lexicon....
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Publisher / Publication Date: St Martins Pr 2014
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 801.3 DICBeaver, David I.
Summary: "In much of the theory of meaning, philosophers and linguists have focused on the use of language in conveying information in cooperative informational exchanges. As a result, political uses of speech, of the sort that political propaganda exemplifies, have not been taken to be a central case of language use. In this book, Jason Stanley and David Beaver focus on the political use of speech as a...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Princeton University Press 2023
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Place a hold to request this item.Sanders, Ella Frances.
Summary: "An artistic collection of 50 drawings featuring unique, funny, and poignant foreign words that have no direct translation into English. Did you know that the Japanese have a word to express the way sunlight filters through the leaves of trees? Or that there's a Swedish word to describe the reflection of the moon across the water? The nuanced beauty of language is even more interesting and...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Ten Speed Press 2014
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 410 SANEverett, Caleb
Summary: "A guide to how languages around the world differ from one another far more than we realize and point to fundamental differences in how people conceive of everything from time to color to smell"--
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Publisher / Publication Date: Harvard University Press 2023
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 306.44 EVEBergen, Benjamin K
Summary: "Everyone swears. Only the rare individual can avoid ever letting slip an expletive, whether after a few cocktails, a stubbed toe, or in flagrante delicto. And yet at the same time, we all accept all limits on swearing--tacitly, through censorship, and actively, as we hold our tongues around children in the vain effort to shield them. We even punish children for uttering, in passing, the very...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Basic Books 2016
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1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 400 BERMcCulloch, Gretchen
Summary: "A linguistically informed look at how our digital world is transforming the English language. Language is humanity's most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is making our language change faster and in more interesting ways than ever before. Internet conversations are structured by the shape of our apps and platforms, from the grammar of status updates to the protocols of...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Riverhead Books 2019
Copies Available at Peninsula
1 available in Adult, Call number: 302.23 MCCCopies Available at Woodmere
1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: 302.23 MCCCopies Available at Interlochen
1 available in Adult Non-fiction, Call number: Word McCullochMarian, Viorica
Summary: "This revolutionary book goes beyond any recent book on language to dissect how language operates in our minds and how to harness its virtually limitless power. As Dr. Marian explains, while you may well think you speak only one language, in fact your mind accommodates multiple codes of communication. Some people speak Spanish, some Mandarin. Some speak poetry, some are fluent in math. The...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Dutton 2023
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Place a hold to request this item.Reames, Robin
Summary: "For most of the 2,000-plus years since its foundation as a discipline by ancient Greek thinkers, rhetoric-the art of using language to persuade-was a keystone of a Western education. But in the early 20th century, studying rhetoric fell out of fashion. In The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself, Robin Reames, one of the world's leading scholars of rhetoric, argues that it's high time to bring...
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Publisher / Publication Date: Basic Books 2024