The Word Circus: A Letter-Perfect Book (Lighter Side of Language Series)

Richard Lederer gets a greater charge out of the English language than a kid gets from a Volkswagen full of clowns. His playful examination of "the most tintinnabulating of the world's tongues" in The Word Circus is more fun than a barrel of monkeys (however fun that is), and Dave Morice's illustrations are no sideshow: they are as clever and charming as the text they accompany.

There's a lot going on in Lederer's big tent. Words are beheaded in one ring (the devil becomes evil) and curtailed in another (watch this priest become someone who pries). Over there, they're being cut right in two (does he bewilder? Be wilder!). Step right up, barks our emcee at the homophone (ewe/u/yew/you), and watch me juggle one phrase to make another: hand me the nudist colony and I'll show you no untidy clothes. Palindromes, like push-me-pull-yous, parade to and fro. And oh, the verbal freaks you'll meet: grammagrams, heteronyms, vowelless things; consonant packs (catchphrase) and silent strings (Brougham).

According to Lederer, the late poet James Merrill once commented that, "We speak wistfully of sounding the depths of language, but language has its shallows too, and we can drown in those just as easily as in the raptures of the former." Lederer certainly does. Let his circus begin! --Jane Steinberg