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The Superior Person's Book of Words

10 best books like The Superior Person's Book of Words (Peter Bowler): Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Get Thee to a Punnery: An Anthology of Intentional Assaults Upon the English Language, Limits of Language: Almost Everything You Didn't Know You Didn't Know about Language and Languages, They Have a Word for It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words & Phrases, An Exaltation of Larks: The Ultimate Edition, In Paul Klee's Enchanted Garden, Calvin and Hobbes 1: Thereby Hangs a Tale, Viva la Repartee: Clever Comebacks and Witty Retorts from History's Great Wits and Wordsmiths, Non Campus Mentis: World History According to College Students, Encyclopedia of Bad Taste

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
AuthorEbenezer Cobham Brewer
Various editions of this book are available online in digitized form. But that shouldn't stop you from getting your own physical copy. Nothing can rival the joy of browsing through it - you're bound to learn something fascinating along the way. As Terry Pratchett says in the Foreword, it's a storehouse...
Get Thee to a Punnery: An Anthology of Intentional Assaults Upon the English Language
AuthorRichard Lederer
Parts of this book were really fascinating. I liked reading about the different types of puns and other types of word play. As a dictionary of puns, it really works and has a lot of good examples. Sometimes there were too many examples and I really didn't want to read through them all. Some of the puns relied...
Limits of Language: Almost Everything You Didn't Know You Didn't Know about Language and Languages
AuthorMikael Parkvall
ISBN1590281985
Answers all your questions about language...even the ones you never thought to ask.

How did...
• the discovery of a mysterious Persian mummy lead to a murder investigation?
• the word "dord" come to appear in English, and then disappear again?
• a border collie named Rico...
They Have a Word for It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words & Phrases
AuthorHoward Rheingold
They Have a Word for It takes the reader to the far corners of the globe to discover words and phrases for which there are no equivalents in English. From the North Pole to New Guinea, from Easter Island to Tibet, Howard Rheingold explores more than forty familiar and obscure languages to discover genuinely...
An Exaltation of Larks: The Ultimate Edition
AuthorJames Lipton
ISBN0140170960
An "exaltation of larks"? Yes! And a "leap of leopards," a "parliament of owls," an "ostentation of peacocks," a "smack of jellyfish," and a "murder of crows"!

For those who have ever wondered if the familiar "pride of lions" and "gaggle of geese" were only the tip of a linguistic iceberg, James...
In Paul Klee's Enchanted Garden
AuthorAudun Eckhoff
ISBN3775721010
Many call Paul Klee a magician. He was no such thing; he did not conjure up anything. He was a creator who found beauty in the world around him, wrote one of Klee's students from the legendary Bauhaus. The Swiss-born painter, like many of his contemporaries--Kandinsky among them--was interested in Transcendentalism...
Calvin and Hobbes 1: Thereby Hangs a Tale
AuthorBill Watterson
ISBN0751505080
If you have read the first Calvin and Hobbes directory that was published in the 80's, then you have read this one.
It is a paperback version of half the first book. With classic strips.

Was inspired to read it after watching "Dear Mr. Watterson" documentary on Netflix.

I missed...
Viva la Repartee: Clever Comebacks and Witty Retorts from History's Great Wits and Wordsmiths
AuthorMardy Grothe
ISBN0060789484
For most of us, that perfect retort or witty reply often escapes us when we need it most, only to come to mind with perfect clarity when it's too late to be useful. The twentieth-century writer Heywood Broun described this all-too-common phenomenon when he wrote "Repartee is what we wish we'd said."

In...
Non Campus Mentis: World History According to College Students
AuthorAnders Henriksson
ISBN0761122745
Mangled Moments of Western Civilization from Term Papers & Blue Book Exams

Did You Know:
Cesar was assassinated on the Yikes of March when he is reported to have said, "Me too, Brutus!"
Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Truman were known as the "Big Three"
Rasputin was a pheasant...
Encyclopedia of Bad Taste
AuthorJane Stern
The subtitle of this heavenly concoction is: A celebration of American pop culture at its most joyfully outrageous.

This is not so much a book as an aspirin to banish gloom. Of course, America marches on and this book needs a major update to include such modern phenomena as Celebrity Rehab and...
The Highly Selective Dictionary for the Extraordinarily Literate
AuthorEugene Ehrlich
ISBN0062701908
Between TV talk shows, radio call-in programs, email and the Internet, spontaneous-talk media has skyrocketed in the '90s. People are interacting more frequently and more fervently than ever before, turning the English language into an indecipherable mess. Now, this unique and concise compendium...
The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations: The Complete Opinionated Guide for the Careful Speaker
AuthorCharles Harrington Elster
The definitive pronouncement on more than 1,500 of our most commonly mispronounced words.

From the language maven Charles Harrington Elster comes an authoritative and unapologetically opinionated look at American speech. As Elster points out, there is no sewer in connoisseur, no dip...
Accomodating Brocolli in the Cemetary: Or Why Can't Anybody Spell
AuthorVivian Cook
ISBN0743270991
"It is a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word." -- Andrew Jackson
Weird or wierd? Necessary or neccessary? Recomend or recommend? English spelling is fiendish, but that doesn't mean you can't have fun with it.

Accomodating Brocolli in the Cemetary is at once a celebration...
The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten
AuthorJeffrey Kacirk
ISBN0684857618
ENTER A GALLERY OF WIT AND WHIMSY
As the largest and most dynamic collection of words ever assembled, the English language continues to expand. But as hundreds of new words are added annually, older ones are sacrificed. Now from the author of Forgotten English comes a collection of fascinating...
The Disheveled Dictionary: A Curious Caper Through Our Sumptuous Lexicon
AuthorKaren Elizabeth Gordon
ISBN0395689902
"What on earth does lagniappe mean? A sluggard who lies around till noon? A she-wolf of Anapurna? A car that demands heavy pampering?" In fact, none of the above. But one can find this Creole French word delectably defined in THE DISHEVELED DICTIONARY, which does for vocabulary what Gordon's cult classic...
The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two: The Hidden Lives and Strange Origins of Common and Not-So-Common Words
AuthorAnu Garg
ISBN0452288614
Fun book about unusual words.

What do Miss Manners, Elmo, and baseball player Rickey Henderson have in common? They are illeists--people who refer to themselves in the third person. (Henderson left this message on his manager's voicemail: "Kevin, this is Rickey, calling on behalf of Rickey.")...
Expletive Deleted: A Good Look at Bad Language
AuthorRuth Wajnryb
ISBN0743274342
Have we always "sworn like sailors"? Has creative cursing developed because we can't just slug people when they make us angry? And if such verbal aggression is universal, why is it that some languages (Japanese, for instance) supposedly do not contain any nasty words? Throughout the twentieth century...
Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure and Preposterous Words
AuthorJosefa Heifetz Byrne
ISBN0806504986
This is probably my most favourite book in my collection.

It is exactly what it says it is, a dictionary of obscure, unusual and preposterous words, and its incredibly entertaining.

Here's some of my favourites:

bumfodder - toilet paper; an opprobrious name for a collection...
Dictionary of Word Origins: Histories of More Than 8,000 English-Language Words
AuthorJohn Ayto
ISBN1559702141
One of the better etymological dictionaries of English, not because it's especially comprehensive but on the contrary because it takes a smallish selection (around 8,000 words only) and treats each entry in detail. Unlike traditional dictionaries of this kind, which work backwards in time, Ayto...
The Synonym Finder
AuthorJ.I. Rodale
ISBN0446370290
This is a great resource for high school and college students, writers in general, or anyone who is in a composition class of some type. What I like best about this thesaurus is that it is very comprehensive. There are many synonyms given for the words, and the choices are highly effective. This book is...
Verbatim: From the bawdy to the sublime, the best writing on language for word lovers, grammar mavens, and armchair linguists
AuthorErin McKean
A brilliant, witty, and engagin exploration of the many facets of the English language.

For thir years VERBATIM: The language Quarterly has published amusing, interesting, and occasionally useful essays on concept, usage, jargon, wordplay, lexicography, linguistics, blunders, malapropisms,...
Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English
AuthorJames Cochrane
ISBN1402203314
In the spirit of the bestselling Eats, Shoots & Leaves, this is an informative and highly amusing little book about bad English, full of examples of the incorrect grammar and usage that often pervades modern radio broadcasts, newspaper articles, classroom discussions, and political speeches....
The F-Word
AuthorJesse Sheidlower
ISBN0571197302
There's something special about a lexicon in which more than half the entries begin with the same letter. The F-Word earned its title the hard way: editor Jesse Sheidlower and the staff of Random House combed vast numbers of books, magazines, films, and other works for references to the most beloved,...
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