Ammon Shea: 5 books
The Phone Book
The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads
Language: English
Release Date: October 5, 2010
Read Ammon Shea's blogs and other content on the Penguin Community.
A surprising, lively, and rich history of that ubiquitous doorstop that most of us take for granted.
Ammon Shea is not your typical thirtysomething book enthusiast. After reading the Oxford English Dictionary from cover...
Reading the OED
One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages
Language: English
Release Date: July 2, 2008
An obsessive word lover's account of reading the entire Oxford English Dictionary, hailed as "the Super Size Me of lexicography."
"I'm reading the OED so you don't have to," says Ammon Shea on his slightly masochistic journey to scale the word lover's Mount Everest: the Oxford English Dictionary....
Depraved English
The Most Disgusting and Hilarious Word Book Ever
Language: English
Release Date: July 8, 2014
From aboiement to zooerastia, a guided tour of the lantrified underbelly of the English language
This unusual, un-put-downable little volume by Peter Novobatzky and Ammon Shea collects more than three hundred of the English language's most disgusting, offensive, and obscene words--words that...
Bad English
A History of Linguistic Aggravation
Language: English
Release Date: June 3, 2014
The author of Reading the OED presents an eye-opening look at language “mistakes” and how they came to be accepted as correct—or not.
English is a glorious mess of a language, cobbled together from a wide variety of sources and syntaxes, and changing over time with popular usage. Many...
by Peter Novobatzky, Ammon Shea
Language: English
Release Date: June 9, 2001
Language: English
Release Date: June 9, 2001
At last, a compendium of ingeniously insulting words for every occasion.
For anyone who's been stymied by the level of sloth, bad looks and low intelligence of his fellow man (and woman), help is on the way. You can't change the tiresome creatures around you, but now you can describe them behind...