Unquestionably, The Word Factory is the perfect guide to better English Grammar and effortless writing. According to one newspaper report, universities in England had begun to penalise students who employed incorrect grammar in their essays. In South Africa, the analysis of seventy-four thousand short stories found that written work of children was littered with SMS language, American slang, exclamation marks, and references to celebrities. All through my formative years, I had to contend with five different languagesEnglish, Afrikaans, and two other dialects, which for the most part, accounted for my inability to translate thought into words effortlessly and inhibited my willingness to participate in lively social discussions especially in the course of my high school years. However, possessed of determination, I had vowed to overcome that infirmity. My need to succeed at all costs precipitated the memorisation of the entire Pocket Oxford Dictionary, an accomplishment that spanned ten long years, following which a further ten years were spent in acquainting myself with most English phrases, idiomatic expressions, and collecting the data and fully researching it. I decided to name the compilation The Word Factory. The fruits of my efforts, but more specifically the extensive employment of The Word Factory, not only marked my rise onto the podiums as master of ceremonies and public speaker, but had also enabled me to write approximately twenty-five articles to the Cape Argus, Cape Towns pre-eminent newspaper, within the space of two years, with 100 per cent publication rate.

“We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets.” With wit and irreverence, lexicographer Kory Stamper cracks open the obsessive world of dictionary writing, from the agonizing decisions about what to define and how to do it to the knotty questions of ever-changing word usage. Filled with fun facts—for example, the first documented usage of “OMG” was in a letter to Winston Churchill—and Stamper’s own stories from the linguistic front lines (including how she became America’s foremost “irregardless” apologist, despite loathing the word), Word by Word is an endlessly entertaining look at the wonderful complexities and eccentricities of the English language.

In a strange land where people must buy and swallow the words they wish to speak, Phileas hopes to communicate his love to Cybele using the small vocabulary he has been able to afford.

By examining in detail the material life of pre-industrial peoples around the world, Fernand Braudel significantly changed the way historians view their subject. Originally published in the early 1980s, Civilization traces the social and economic history of the world from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution, although his primary focus is Europe. Braudel skims over politics, wars, etc., in favor of examining life at the grass roots: food, drink, clothing, housing, town markets, money, credit, technology, the growth of towns and cities, and more. Volume I describes food and drink, dress and housing, demography and family structure, energy and technology, money and credit, and the growth of towns.