Richard Lederer, author of Anguished English and other popular language books: "If you love language and the unvarnished truth, you'll love Everything You Know About English Is Wrong."
FeatureBook.com: "A good counterpoint to Lynne Truss’s anxiety-inducing Eats, Shoots & Leaves."
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Sample Entries:
Everything You Know About English Is Wrong demythifies the BS often associated with grammar "rules," word "origins," famous "real" quotes, and other common "knowledge" you can put into "quote marks." So it's appropriate that one of our sample entries is the word that begins the entire book, and the entry the debulls the bull.
Bull
File under “Shit, Bull”: “Bull!” is not necessarily a scatological epithet.
If you believe that bull is short for bullshit, you are in essence bullshitting yourself.
Just as you don’t mutter “Horse!” as a shortening of the horse-excrement epithet, you aren’t speaking of bovine droppings when you use the word bull. The origins of this meaning of bull aren’t fully clear, but the word did not result from earthy shortening. Bull could be related to the verb “to bull,” which descends from the old French bouler, “to deceive.” In English, bull the verb meant “to deceive or cheat” by the mid 1500s, and “to boast vacuously” by the mid 1800s. By the early 1600s, bull the noun versus bull the verb meant something that couldn’t be, something self-contradictory. And its sense of “nonsense, insincerities or lies” has been around since by 1915. But though bull is now synonymous with BS, it is not the same word.
And I wouldn’t horse you about that.
More samples
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