In Making Sense, David Crystal confronts the foe of many: grammar. Once taught relentlessly to all students in the English-speaking world, grammar disappeared from most school curricula, so that terms such as "preposition" and "conjunction" now often confound children and adults alike. Explaining the nuts and bolts of grammar presents a special challenge, because - far more than is the case with spelling and punctuation - the subject is burdened with a centuries-old history of educational practice that many will recall as anything but glamorous. One of the world's foremost...
In Making Sense, David Crystal confronts the foe of many: grammar. Once taught relentlessly to all students in the English-speaking world, gr...
Have you ever cringed while hearing someone mispronounce a word--or, worse, been tripped up by a wily silent letter yourself? Consider yourself lucky that you do not live in Victorian England, when the way you pronounced a word was seen as a sometimes-damning index of who you were and how you should be treated. No wonder then that jokes about English usage provided one of Punch magazine's most fruitful veins of humor for sixty years, from its first issue in 1841 to 1900. For We Are Not Amused, renowned English-language expert David Crystal has explored the most common...
Have you ever cringed while hearing someone mispronounce a word--or, worse, been tripped up by a wily silent letter yourself? Consider yourself lucky ...
