Lingotastic

"Do you like your garlic Goodfellas thin? Have you ever been part of a carrotmob? Why are bartenders fat washing their spirits (and what does that even mean? Eatymology demystifies the most fascinating new food words to emerge from today's professional kitchens, food science laboratories, pop culture, the Web, and more."

"In this quirky and humorous volume, Graeme Donald explores the fascinating links and curious connections between words."

"What is the actual connection between disgruntled and gruntled? What links church organs to organised crime, California to the Caliphate, or brackets to codpieces? The Etymologicon springs from Mark Forsyth's Inky Fool blog on the strange connections between words."

"Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word is the first history of the world's great tongues, gloriously celebrating the wonder of words that binds communities together and makes possible both the living of a common history and the telling of it."

"The metaphor is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are 'metaphors we live by"—metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them."

"A riveting account of the astonishing experiences and discoveries made by linguist Daniel Everett while he lived with the Pirahã, a small tribe of Amazonian Indians in central Brazil."

"F, U, C and K – four letters that can cause outrage, scandal, embarrassment or instant relief if you hit your thumb with a hammer. Here's an amusing, informative, controversial and utterly irreverent history of the world’s favourite word."

An exploration of the remarkable history, eccentricities, resilience and sheer fun of the English language by the author who wrote "A Short History of Nearly Everything".

"In this book, Ranjit Bolt takes what is essentially a practitioner's view of the art of literary translation. His observations are born of a quarter of a century's experience of translating for a living, especially for the theatre."

"Here's a book that does more than define the terms your stockbroker, the Wall Street Journal and CNBC pitch at you it explains them in a way that traditional dictionaries cant."

"Using translation as his lens, David Bellos shows how much we can learn about ourselves by exploring the ways we use translation, from the historical roots of written language to the stylistic choices of Ingmar Bergman, from the United Nations General Assembly to the significance of James Cameron's Avatar."

"An essay by George Orwell that criticises the 'ugly and inaccurate' written English of his time and examines the connection between political orthodoxies and the debasement of language."

"In this classic, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved."