When You Catch An Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better And/Or Worse
Irreverent humor about the English language.
From the Introduction:
"In the end, it came down to two potential titles. Number one, 'When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It.' Number two, 'Pimp My Ride.' I have to admit that I carry a torch for number two--which alludes, of course, to the popular MTV series in which a posse of automotive artisans take a run-down jalopy and sleek it up into an awe-inspiring vehicle containing many square yards of plush velvet and an astonishing number of LCD screens. Leaving aside the fact that it would have lent a faint aura of hipness to a book otherwise sorely lacking in street cred, 'Pimp My Ride' illustrates a deep and wonderful truth about the parts of speech: they change like the dickens. 'Pimp'--a noun meaning a procurer of prostitutes--turns into a transitive verb, meaning, roughly, 'to make pimp-worthy.' And the intransitive verb 'ride' becomes a noun, meaning that in which one rides."
Praise for "When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It":
“Absolutely required--and utterly fun--reading for anyone who cares about the work-in-progress that is the English language. Marvelous in every way.”
—Christopher Buckley
“All hail to Ben Yagoda! Not only has he publicly rescued mother from the ubiquitous debasement of mom, and consigned shall to the schoolmarm’s dead-rules inferno, but--ebulliently--he dresses Fowler, his eminent usage-predecessor, in relaxed American shoes. Yagoda’s invigorating interrogation of our language will excite every syntax-obsessed reader and writer. (And there are more of us than you might think.)”
—Cynthia Ozick
"It has the spirit I love most in books about writing and language: a wide-ranging curiosity about how writers make meaning, flavored by the delight that comes any time we play with words."
--Roy Peter Clark, The Poynter Institute
"Yagoda ... isn't trying to reinvent the style guide, just offering his personal tour of some of the English language's idiosyncrasies. Using the parts of speech as signposts, he charts an amiable path between those critics for whom any alterations to established grammar are hateful and those who believe whatever people use in speech is by default acceptable. Where many writing instructors rail against the use of adverbs, for example, he points out that they can be quite useful for conveying subtle relationships ordinary verbs can't describe.... Every chapter has gems tucked inside, like the section in pronouns on the 'third-person athletic,' the voice celebrity ballplayers use to refer to themselves in interviews.... Readers won't toss their copies of Strunk & White off the shelf, but Yagoda's witty grammar will rest comfortably next to the masters."
--Publishers Weekly
"[Yagoda's] book, an ode to the parts of speech, isn't about the rights or wrongs of English. It's about the wonder of it all."
--New York Times Book Review
"Yagoda has a blast chopping, mincing and dicing sentences back down into their designated ingredients... [He] is his own walking billboard for the joys of imaginative, precise and fresh language uses."
--Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air"
"More fun than diagramming sentences, and more informative than 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves.'"
--Philadelphia Weekly
"Yagoda elegantly blends his pop culture sensibility with an impressive breadth of learning to produce a book that will both enlighten and amuse anyone who thinks seriously about language."
--The Writer
