Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen Audiobook (Free)

‘Hilarious . . This book charmed my socks off.’ ?Patricia O’Conner, NY Times Book Review Mary Norris has spent a lot more than three years in The New Yorker’s duplicate section, maintaining its celebrated large standards. Now she brings her vast experience, great cheer, and finely sharpened pencils to greatly help ordinary people inside a boisterous vocabulary book as full of life as it is usually of practical guidance. Greek to Me features Norris’s laugh-out-loud descriptions of some of the most common and vexing about Greek if you ask me: Adventures of the Comma Queen complications in spelling, punctuation, and use?comma faults, danglers, ‘who’ vs. ‘whom,’ ‘that’ vs. ‘which,’ substance words, gender-neutral language?and her clear explanations of how to handle them. Down-to-earth and often open-minded, she pulls on good examples from Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Henry Adam, as well as the Lord’s Prayer, as well as in the Honeymooners, The Simpsons, David Foster Wallace, and Gillian Flynn. She will take us to see a duplicate of Noah Webster’s groundbreaking Blue-Back Speller, on a quest to find out who put the hyphen in Moby-Dick, on the pilgrimage towards the world’s just pencil-sharpener museum, and in the hallowed halls of The New Yorker and her use such celebrated authors as Pauline Kael, Philip Roth, and George Saunders. Visitors?and writers?will find in Norris neither a scold nor a softie but a wise and witty new friend in love with vocabulary and alive to the glories of its use in America, even in age autocorrect and spell-check. As Norris writes, ‘The dictionary is a wonderful thing, nevertheless, you can’t let it force you around.’