Millions of fans around the globe punctuate properly and communicate clearly thanks to Mignon Fogarty’s practical and easy-to-remember advice about writing style and word usage. Now, in tip-of-the-day form, Grammar Girl serves up 365 lessons on language that are sure to inspire.

Filled with new, bite-size writing tips, quizzes, puzzles, and efficient memory tricks, The Grammar Devotional gives you a daily dose of knowledge to improve your writing and also serves as a lasting reference you’ll use for years to come.

Words are essential to our everyday lives; we spend our day enveloped in conversations, e-mails, phone calls, text messages, directions, headlines, and more. But how often do we stop to think about the origins of the words we use? Have you ever thought about which words in English have been borrowed from Arabic, Dutch, or Portuguese? Henry Hitchings delves into the insatiable, ever-changing English language and reveals how and why it has absorbed words from more than 350 other languages?many originating from the most unlikely of places, such as shampoo from Hindi and kiosk from Turkish.

A panda walks into a cafe. It orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires a shot into the air. “Why?”, the waiter asks. The panda gives him a wildlife manual and the waiter reads, “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.” So, punctuation really does matter, even if it is only a mater of life and death.

Through sloppy usage and low standards on the Internet, in e-mail, and now “txt msgs,” we have made proper punctuation an endangered species. It is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them as the wonderful and necessary things they are.

If there are only pedants left who care, then so be it. This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset when it is mishandled. From George Orwell shunning the semicolon, to New Yorker editor Harold Ross’s epic arguments with James Thurber over commas, this history makes a case for the preservation of a system of printing conventions that is much too subtle to be mucked about with.

Sticklers, unite!

The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten: 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 archaic words and phrases, providing an enticing glimpse into the past. With beguiling period illustrations, The Word Museum offers up the marvelous oddities and peculiar enchantments of old and unusual words.

Are you so sure about “assure,” “ensure,” and “insure”? Can you determine whether a knob of butter is equivalent to a lump or a pat or a scosh? Can you say which word in the English language has the most definitions, or who put the H in Jesus H. Christ?

If you can’t, be assured that Charles Harrington Elster, author of several well-loved works on language, can-and does in his latest book, a delightfully designed compendium of the most common, interesting, and entertaining conundrums in our language. Drawing upon esoteric sources and his own inimitable expertise, Elster uses a lively question-and-answer format to cover a variety of topics-word and phrase origins, slang, style, usage, punctuation, and pronunciation. Every chapter features original brainteasers, challenging puzzles, and a trove of literary trivia.

Bryson de-mythologizes his native land-explaining how a dusty desert hamlet with neither woods nor holly became Hollywood, how the Wild West wasn’t won, why Americans say ‘lootenant’ and ‘Toosday’, how Americans were eating junk food long before the word itself was cooked up – as well as exposing the true origin of the G-string, the original $64,000 question and Dr Kellogg of cornflakes fame.

A dictionary for those who perceive a difference, a handbook for Superior Persons who love words. Are you a rasorial searcher after words? Are nouns your bread? Adjectives your butter? Verbs your salad? Adverbs your house dressing? Well, then, this is the book to shiver your futtocks! Put an end to fopdoody speech; amaze your friends, baffle your enemies, write interoffice memos to end all discussion!

A Superior Person is not defined by income, class, or sex. A Superior Person uses Superior Speech. And, if Aristotle’s definition of art as something both entertaining and edifying is still toasted with glee, then there’s art a-chock-a-block in Mr. Bowler’s dictionary-a funny, useful, and elevating little book.

How did the expression “a wild-goose chase” originate? Did you know that people used to “let the cat out of the bag” literally? Dr. Funk has taken these and over four hundred other curious expressions and sayings that, without thought, we use in our daily speech. He has traced them back through the years or centuries in an effort to determine their sources, to find out what the original allusions were, or to give us his expert opinion when facts cannot be traced.