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Everything You Know About English Is Wrong
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Everything You Know About English Is Wrong
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Everything You Know About English Is Wrong
Ebook250 pages4 hours

Everything You Know About English Is Wrong

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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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.)
LanguageEnglish
PublisherSourcebooks
Release dateMay 1, 2008
ISBN9781402233449
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Everything You Know About English Is Wrong

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The book starts with a simple premise: Everything you know about English is wrong. The book is split up into sections explaining why everything you thought you knew about English is wrong.Well, not everything, it's mostly about rumours floating around on Internet message boards about the etymology of words, such as "bullshit" and "bull" are not really etymologically related, "fuck" is not "fornication under consent of the king", and "shit" is not "ship high in transit".The book also talks about the changing meaning of words, and tells "persnicketers" that if they are upset with a new meaning of a word, they should make sure to always use it in its original meaning, which the author makes sure to include. Meanings that often go back to the 1300s.My only complaint is the segment on the use of "literally" when describing something that is quite obviously not what literally happened. The author's argument is that when someone uses an expression (the given example is "I was (literally) climbing the walls"), without the word "literally", the speaker is still describing the event literally, but it is understood to be figurative. When they add the word "literally", they are still describing a literal event, and it is still understood to be figurative. It was a good argument, but that use still bothers me because it is using a word with a clearly defined meaning to mean the opposite of what it does.Finally, the book includes a very important grammar lesson: There is only one rule in English writing that is followed everywhere, in fiction, in nonfiction, in technical writing and even in poetry. That rule is that you *never* start a sentence with a comma.