The Life of a Language

Whether you're a native speaker or far from fluent, you'll find that these recent books on the English language — its history, use and abuse — will entertain and instruct:

The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language. Melvyn Bragg's engrossing tale of the evolution of the language of Shakespeare, from its origins as a minor Germanic dialect to 21st century ubiquity.

The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary.Simon Winchester serves up a fascinating account of the colorful cast of characters responsible for the epic compilation.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. The U.K.'s surprise best seller of the holiday season, Lynne Truss's wonderfully pedantic salvo is sure to warm the hearts of would-be copy editors everywhere.

Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English. Another unapologetic linguistic curmudgeon, James Cochrane, skewers offenders who say "could of" instead of "could have" and confuse "amount" — to be used with nouns that have no plural — and "number" — to be used with nouns that can be enumerated.