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Attention language lovers: prepare to be taken prisoner. Willard R. Espy, word gamester extraordinaire, has put together more than 200 sublimely satisfying diversions -- including acrostics, clerihews, epigrams, cryptograms, spoonerisms, palindromes, puns, and much, much more. Presented here are the wildest array of tongue twisters, brainteasers, and other mind-benders new and old, along with notes on their histories, tips on how to play them or solve them, and page after page of mind-boggling challenges you won't find anywhere else. It is a celebration of the energy, wit, flexibility, and fun of the English language by its most ardent aficionado.
A January to December "almanac" of verses and wordplay.
An easy-to-use dictionary of over 80,000 rhyming words.
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On title page: A bobtailed, generally chronological listing of proper names that have become proper and uncommonly common; together with a smattering of proper names commonly used ... and certain other diversions.
“Doing things by the book” acquires a whole new meaning in Brandon R. Schrand’s memoir of coming of age in spite of himself. The “works cited” are those books that serve as Schrand’s signposts as he goes from life as a hormone-crazed, heavy-metal wannabe in the remotest parts of working-class Idaho to a reasonable facsimile of manhood (with a stop along the way to buy a five-dollar mustard-colored M. C. Hammer suit, so he’ll fit in at college). The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn informs his adolescent angst over the perceived injustice of society’s refusal to openly discuss boners. The Great Gatsby serves as a metaphor for his indulgent and directionless college days spent in a drunken stupor (when he wasn’t feigning interest in Mormonism to attract women). William Kittredge’s Hole in the Sky parallels his own dangerous adulthood slide into alcoholism and denial. With a finely calibrated wit, a good dose of humility, and a strong supporting cast of literary characters, Schrand manages to chart his own story—about a dreamer thrown out of school as many times as he’s thrown into jail—until he finally sticks his landing.
The Morrises, well-known lexicographers, published a dictionary of the same title in 1977, a revision of a three-volume work published between 1962 and 1971. This new revision, which provides histories of interesting words and phrases in the English language, is similar in concept to several books by John Ciardi. Like Ciardi's works, the etymologies and phrase origins are presented in a readable style, making them a joy to browse.
Welcome to the Weird and Wonderful World of Words! Tyrannosaurus Lex is your guide to the intriguing world of logology—the pursuit of word puzzles or puzzling words—featuring: •A wealth of witty anagrams, palindromes, and puns •Clever paraprosdokians: sentences with surprising endings (“I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.”—Groucho Marx) •Fascinating oronyms: a pair of phrases that differ in meaning and spelling, yet share a similar pronunciation (“The stuffy nose can lead to problems” versus “The stuff he knows can lead to problems.”) •Peculiar oxymora: words or phrases that are self-contradictory (Jumbo shrimp! Guest host! Gold silverware!) So sit back and get ready to learn about everything from antigrams and aptanagrams to kangaroo words and phantonyms. You’ll never look at language the same again!
Illustrated by Bob Graham.