Richard Lederer - The Miracle of Language

RICHARD LEDERER

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BESTSELLING AUTHOR RICHARD LEDERER

CRAZY ENGLISH The Ultimate Joy Ride Through Our Language

FRACTURED ENGLISH

THE WRITE WAY A Guide to Real-life Writing

THE PLAY OF WORDS Fun & Games for Language Lovers

Available from Pocket Books

PRAISE FOR
THE MIRACLE OF LANGUAGE

and Richard Lederers Other Fascinating Books

Richard Lederer has done it againanother delightful, witty, and hugely absorbing celebration of the English language. Is there no stopping the man?

Bill Bryson, author of Made in America

With THE MIRACLE OF LANGUAGE, Lederer, Americas foremost wag of words, has also become a sage. That is not to say Lederer has abandoned humorfar from it. MIRACLE is filled with many gems.

The San Diego Union-Tribune

A veritable Cooks tour of the wonderful English languagefrom its major highways to its little-known but fascinating byways and back roads.

Don Hauptman, author of Cruel and Unusual Puns

Lederers collection on the English language can be read from start to finish or browsed at will, and it is consistently enjoyable. This witty compendium both entertains and instructs.

ALA Booklist

Entertaining and enlightening a delightful and edifying collection.

Publishers Weekly

Richard Lederers delight in English is itself delightfuland contagious.

Edwin Newman, author of Strictly Speaking

CRAZY ENGLISH

Crazy English is a gem.

San Francisco Chronicle

Lederer beguiles and bedazzles.

Los Angeles Times

Crazy English is great fun.

Pittsburgh Press

Hot dog! In a nutshell, Lederer is pleasing as punch.

Indianapolis Star

A joyride Lederer celebrates the semantic antics of our language.

Boston Herald

For sheer fun, you couldnt find a nicer gift than Crazy English by Richard Lederer.

James J. Kilpatrick

Holy cow! English has never been better.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Crazy English? Crazy like a fox, this man Lederer. Ours is a language that reveals its secrets in winks, allusions, sighs, and giggles. Richard Lederer, being a genius, has taken the giggle road. Dont be bothered that you will laugh from the first page of the book to the lastat the end you will be better equipped to convey exactly what you mean, however serious the subject may be.

Willard Espy

THE WRITE WAY

An entertaining, clearly written, concise guide to writing Ideal for anyone who wants to be a better writer.

The Times Record (Brunswick, ME)

This commonsense approach to good writing belongs on every library shelf. Anyone familiar with Lederers previous books on the use and abuse of the English language will not be surprised by the abundance of humor used on these pages to lighten what might otherwise be a very dreary topic.

Kliatt

Books by Richard Lederer

Adventures of a Verbivore

Anguished English

Basic Verbal Skills (with Philip Burnham)

Crazy English

Fractured English

Get Thee to a Punnery

Literary Trivia (with Michael Gilleland)

The Miracle of Language

More Anguished English

Nothing Risqu, Nothing Gained

The Play of Words

Puns & Games

The Word Circus

The Write Way (with Richard Dowis)

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RICHARD LEDERER

THE
MIRACLE
OF
LANGUAGE

POCKET BOOKS

New York London Toronto Sydney

Lyrics from Whats Love Got to Do with It (Terry Britten, Graham Hamilton Lyle), copyright 1984 MYAXE MUSIC LTD. & GOOD SINGLE LTD. All rights on behalf of MYAXE MUSIC LTD. administered by WB MUSIC CORP. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Excerpts from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Hollow Men in Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., copyright 1963, 1964 by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Excerpt from Burnt Norton in Four Quartets, copyright 1943 by T. S. Eliot, and renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

Emily Dickinson from And Pastures New: A Collection of Poems, copyright 1956 by Melville Cane and renewed 1984 by Katherine Detre and Mary Robinson. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover in 1991 by Pocket Books

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 1991 by Richard Lederer

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions
thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books,
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lederer, Richard, 1938

The miracle of language / Richard Lederer.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN: 0-671-02811-1

eISBN 13: 978-1-4391-3940-0

ISBN 13: 978-0-6710-2811-4

1. English languageStyle.
2. Language and languagesQuotations, maxims, etc.
I. Title.

PE121.B68 1991

428dc20 91-18639

CIP

First Pocket Books trade paperback printing April 1999

10 9 8 7 6 5

POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

Text design by Stanley S. Drate/Folio Graphics Co. Inc.

Cover design by John Fontana

Printed in the U.S.A.

To my father and my mother
and my sisters and my brothers

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Anne Lederer, my daughter, for making How Do We Know What We Know? a family affair; to Marty Capodice for the research on One Word Can Change the World; to Merriam-Webster for suggesting many of the Brave New Words; to Andre Hurtgen for his wisdom about foreign languages; to Beverly McDonald, Gertrude King Ramstrom, Lorraine Stickney, and Larry Katzenbach for their compact and indestructible contributions to this book; and to my students at St. Pauls School, especially Charles Shaffer, Celia Wren, Jennifer Home, and Ashley Elinor, for their enrichment of these chapters.

I am especially grateful to my editor Jane Rosenman, whose work so embodies an abiding love for the miracle of language.

Versions of some of the chapters in this book have appeared in Verbatim, Writers Digest,