‘Hilarious . . This reserve charmed my socks off.’ ?Patricia O’Conner, New York Times Reserve Review Mary Norris has spent a lot more than three years in The New Yorker’s copy section, maintaining its celebrated great standards. Right now she brings her vast experience, good cheer, and finely sharpened pencils to help ordinary people within a boisterous vocabulary book as full of life since it is of practical advice. Greek to Me features Norris’s laugh-out-loud descriptions of a few of the most common and vexing about Greek to 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 always open-minded, she pulls on illustrations from Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Henry Adam, and the Lord’s Prayer, as well as from The Honeymooners, The Simpsons, David Foster Wallace, and Gillian Flynn. She will take us to see a copy of Noah Webster’s groundbreaking Blue-Back Speller, on a quest to learn who place the hyphen in Moby-Dick, on a pilgrimage towards the world’s just pencil-sharpener museum, and inside the hallowed halls of THE BRAND NEW Yorker and her work with such celebrated writers as Pauline Kael, Philip Roth, and George Saunders. Readers?and writers?will see in Norris neither a scold nor a softie but a wise and witty fresh friend deeply in love with vocabulary and alive towards the glories of its use in the us, even in the age of autocorrect and spell-check. As Norris writes, ‘The dictionary is an excellent thing, nevertheless, you can’t allow it force you around.’