10 grammar books to read before you die of boredom | Mind your language

A seasonal selection of new (and not so new) books about language that are anything but dullBooks about English fall into various categories, mostly offputting ones: the academic, rarely of much interest, and often incomprehensible, to the general reader; the lament for a (mythical) golden age "when everyone knew how to use grammar"; the prescriptions of Dr Grammar (do this, or you are clearly illiterate). Here are some that avoid these traps.Best of the newTaking as its premise that what you say matters less than how you say it, Mark Forsyth's Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase (Icon Books) takes us on an informative but highly entertaining journey through the figures of rhetoric, demonstrating the tricks used by writers as diverse as John Milton and Katy Perry to produce memorable phrases.As in his previous books, The Etymologicon (which dealt with the connections between words) and The Horologicon (which covered obsolete words), the author employs his ingenious trademark of ending one section with a word that starts the next, which I think is a form of anadiplosis. It means you are likely to start off reading a couple of chapters, and end up reading the whole book in one go.Some of the rhetorical devices he discusses are well known, such as alliteration (Pride and Prejudice, Power to the People), but most will be unfamiliar terms. Forsyth's examples bring them immediately to life: for example polyptoton, where you repeat a word in a different sen...
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