Words, Word Play, and Grammar

Cartoonist Jon Agee is known for his riotous collections of palindromes, which are phrases that read exactly the same both forward and backward. Try Go Hang a Salami, I’m a Lasagna Hog! (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992), So Many Dynamos (1994), or Sit on a Potato Pan, Otis! (1999). The illustrations are hilarious; and the palindromes range from the short (“Llama mall”) to the amazingly enormous. Affordable used copies available. For ages 10 and up.

By Jon Agee, Who Ordered the Jumbo Shrimp? (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002) is a cartoon take on oxymorons – contradictory phrases such as “civil war,” which in this book is paired with an illustration of a knight politely apologizing for beheading his opponent. For ages 9 and up.

William Steig’s letter-code books are also great (and educational) fun for imaginative word-lovers of all ages: in CDB! (Aladdin, 2003), the title illustration shows a pair of children pointing at a bumblebee. The translation is “See the bee!” – get it? And there are dozens more. (In one of my favorites, a small boy tells his dog “I M A U-M B-N. U R N N-M-L.” Try it: “I am a human being…”) The sequel, CDC?, begins with a helpful parent showing his small daughter the ocean. All ages.

Richard Lederer’s Pun and Games (Chicago Review Press, 1996) is a collection of wonderful word games and challenges for kids, variously involving awful puns, homographs, homophones, spoonerisms, and more. For ages 8 and up.

Fun with Words is a website devoted to word play, filled with information and puzzles. Categories include anagrams, palindromes, spoonerisms, pangrams, rebus puzzles, word records, and much more.

One criterion for joining the World War II Bletchley Park code-breaking group was the ability to solve crossword puzzles – and nowadays there are hundreds of crossword puzzle books for all ages and interests. Good for problem-solving skills and vocabulary-building. From the Smithsonian Magazine, see How the Crossword Became an American Pastime.

Adrienne Raphel’s Thinking Inside the Box (Penguin, 2021) is a fascinating history of crosswords. For teens and adults.

Try making your own crossword puzzles! See here and here.

Jess Zafarris’s Once Upon a Word (Rockridge Press, 2020) is a fascinating word-origin dictionary for kids, packed with basic information about etymology – the study of words and their origins – and many intriguing word-origin stories. (Try this: “Algebra” comes from the Arabic al-jabr, meaning “a reunion of broken parts,” a term used both in mathematics and in medicine, for the setting of broken bones.) For ages 9 and up.

Stuart Berg Flexner’s Listening to America (Simon & Schuster, 1982) and I Hear America Talking (1979) are illustrated collections of the origins, evolutions, historical contexts, and meanings of thousands of phrases unique to American English – categorized under everything from “Cowboys” and “Dust Bowl” to “Voodoo” and “World War II and GI Joe.” A terrific addition to any American history program.

Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue (Penguin, 2009) is a catchy history of English – the most influential language of modern times and a shameless borrower of words from over fifty different languages around the world. A treasure trove of information and oddities for teens and adults.

Seth Lerer’s Inventing English (Columbia University Press, 2015) traces the history of the language from the age of Beowulf to the age of rap. For teens and adults.

Melvyn Bragg’s The Adventure of English (Arcade, 2011) is a “captivating history” of how English conquered the world. For teens and adults.

Linguist John McWhorter has written several popular books on English and its relatives, among them Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English (Penguin Random House, 2008), The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language (Harper Perennial, 2003), and Words on the Move (Picador, 2017).

By Henry Hitchings, The Language Wars (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011) is the story of the bitter arguments – raging at least since Shakespeare’s time – over just what constitutes proper English. For teens and adults.

In the musical My Fair Lady (1964), phonetics professor Henry Higgins wagers that he can turn cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle into a lady. (“Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?”) Rated G.

From the Children’s University of Manchester, see this illustrated Timeline of the English Language.