As promised, here is a list of links to the sites and books that Wendi and I discussed yesterday. If I missed one, leave a comment and I'll add it.

You may also be interested in this list of (mostly little-known) reference books for writers that I talked about at the Smithsonian last November.

Sites:

• Michael Quinion's World Wide Words.


• Dave Wilton's WordOrigins.com. Great for debunking ("No, something is bunk, and then you debunk it") too-good-to-be-true etymologies.


• The Alt.Usage.English Index Site. See what AUE said about something. Then go double-check it somewhere else, just to be sure ...


• American Dialect Society. The links to the archive searches are in the upper right corner.


• Language Log. Lots of brilliant linguists posting about language observations. Data-based. They tend to be hard on copyeditors, but as long as you don't change any of their 'thats' to 'whiches' (or vice-versa) you should be okay.


• Languagehat. I don't think we mentioned Language Hat, but we should have.


• Anatoly Liberman, AKA the Oxford Etymologist. A link to his book is below.
  

Books:

• Word Origins (and how we know them) by Anatoly Liberman. The working title for this was "Etymology for Everyone," and that pretty much sums up the book!


• The New Oxford American Dictionary


• The Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus


• The Warden of English This is the biography of H. W. Fowler, of Fowler's Modern English Usage.


• Garner's Modern American Usage I forgot to bring up something interesting about this book --it's based on evidence but is very prescriptivist. He asks the question "Do people really write X?" and answers it "Yes, but they shouldn't."


• Word Myths The book by David Wilton (site above) that collects the most egregiously bad etymologies and shows how and why they can't be true.


• Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage


• The Oxford Dictionary of Difficult Words This is a good companion if you have a smaller college or desk dictionary ...


• Slayer Slang: The Slang of Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Michael Adams. Just in case any of you thought I was joking! The essay on ephemeral language is worth reading even if you've never seen an episode of Buffy.


• Woe is I Patricia T. O'Conner's usage book.


• Lapsing into a Comma and Elephants of Style, Bill Walsh's excellent usage books.

If I remember (that is, if enough people nag me) I will try to scan and post the DoD dictionary entry counting paper next week.

Thanks again for your attention and excellent questions yesterday!

This entry was posted by Erin, on Saturday, April 22, 2006. You can leave your response.