Far from the Madding Gerund

Mark Liberman and Geoffrey K. Pullum have collected some of their most insightful and amusing material from Language Log, the popular web site started by Liberman. Often irreverent and hilarious, these brief essays take on many sacred cows, showing us--among many things--why Strunk & White is useless, how the College Board can't identify sentence errors in the SAT, and what makes Dan Brown one of the worst prose stylists in the business.

There is plenty here to inspire deeper thoughts as well. Why do Pete Rose's statements fall short of saying "I'm sorry," and can we learn how to apologize by analyzing his mistakes? Is there such a thing as mind-reading fatigue? What is the meaning of "pluralism" and "Yankeehood"?

Language Log is a site where serious professional linguists go to have fun. There's plenty of fun and plenty to get you thinking about language in new ways in this collection.