Word Play

In the funny, smart mold of The Day the Crayons Quit, this sneaky lesson about the parts of speech is also a delightful story about playground competition and new friends. When the parts of speech gather on the playground, Verb is always the star. She can climb! She can frolic! She can DO anything! Her friends Adjective, Adverb, and Interjection all watch admiringly. ("WOW!" says Interjection.)Then Noun comes along -- and Noun can BE anything. A person! A place! Even a thing! ("PRETTY!" says Interjection.) The other parts of speech are fascinated by this new kid, and Verb doesn't like it one bit.

Why do certain words make us blush or wince? Why do men and women really speak different languages? Why do nursery rhymes in vastly different societies possess similar rhyme and rhythm patterns? What do slang, riddles and puns secretly have in common? This erudite yet irresistibly readable book examines the game of language: its players, strategies, and hidden rules. Drawing on the most fascinating linguistic studies—and touching on everything from the Marx Brothers to linguistic sexism, from the phenomenon of glossolalia to Apache names for automobile parts—Word Play shows what really happens when people talk, no matter what language they happen to be using.

I could have done a much better job of empowering my students with language had I had this book as a young teacher. - Carol Ann Tomlinson Author of The Differentiated Classroom Vocabulary is key - to comprehension, to deep academic understanding, to communication. But with so many words and so little instructional time, how can teachers ensure that students do more than merely memorize word lists? That they make words their own and use them well in all their reading, writing, and speaking activities? In Word Play, Sandra Whitaker, a National Board Certified Teacher, leads the way to effective, meaningful vocabulary instruction that helps students in every subject area. With Word Play you'll teach so that students don't just what know what words mean, but how they convey meaning and what their appropriate uses are. Three aspects of learning must work together for successful vocabulary instruction, and Whitaker details what they are and how to teach them: Morphemic structure - where words come from, how they are formed, and how they can be changed to form new words Conceptual meaning makers - the small but important group of context-specific terms that support meaning making within assigned texts but are rarely used outside those texts Academic vocabulary - cross-discipline and discipline-specific words that support learning by helping students determine meanings in relation to the subjects they study and use precise language to communicate their thinking. Whitaker makes the theoretical practical, presenting the theory and research behind high-quality instruction, then following up with engaging, interesting ways for students to practice all three aspects of vocabulary. You'll replace monotonous memorization with enjoyable activities that capitalize on adolescents' natural interest in words and language. Illustrating her strategies with student samples and stories from real classrooms, Whitaker even presents ideas for differentiation that make vocabulary instruction accessible for all students. Give the gift of language. Put away the boring word lists and teach in ways that promote usage, not memorization. You'll encourage a deeper understanding of texts across the curriculum and provide avenues for students to express their thinking more precisely. Put joy into words with Word Play.

Build reading skills with Sight Word Soup, Word Construction Site, and more!

'No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were poor but honest.' Only words can do that. Words are magic. Words are fun. Join Gyles Brandreth - wit and word-meister, Just A Minute regular, One Show reporter, denizen of Countdown's Dictionary Corner, founder of the National Scrabble Championships, patron of The Queen's English Society, QI, Room 101, Have I Got News For You and Pointless survivor - on an uproarious and unexpected magic carpet ride around the awesome world of words and wordplay. Puns, palindromes, pangrams, Malaprops, euphemisms, mnemonics, acronyms, anagrams, alphabeticals, Tweets, verbiage, verbarrhea - if you can name it, you should find it here, along with the longest, shortest, wittiest, wildest, oldest, latest, oddest, most interesting and most memorable words in the English language - the richest, most remarkable language ever known.

Word Play is a riveting book regarding an interactive game played with words and God. Inside its pages are the clues to understanding the game. The desired result from playing is to know God better. This book addresses confusion generated by the daily use of words without concern for their actual meanings, more specifically, the words used by Christians. It is a book about God and not religion. Some may discover the contents of Word Play strenuous. Word Play is designed to make readers think. There is a good chance your brain will hurt while reading Word Play. If so then I fulfilled my mission. Enlightenment from critical thinking opens the gateway to the heart. When there is clarity there is understanding and where there is understanding there is power. Word Play was written as a tool to access Gods power through words. It is not a book to be taken lightly. Word Play has a new and different approach for understanding more regarding the power of words. Anyone who desires to know more about this power from God should read Word Play. The lessons learned took over two decades to receive. It took almost two years to write about them. Warning: The awareness resulting from reading Word Play may be overwhelming to some. This is not a book for children.

Word Play traces the history of the relationship between experimental aesthetics and Soviet children’s books, a relationship that persisted over the seventy years of the Soviet Union’s existence. From the earliest days of the Soviet project, children’s literature was taken unusually seriously—its quality and subject matter were issues of grave political significance. Yet, it was often written and illustrated by experimental writers and artists who found the childlike aesthetic congenial to their experiments in primitivism, minimalism, and other avant‐garde trends. In the more repressive environment following Stalin’s rise to power, experimental aesthetics were largely relegated to unofficial and underground literature, but unofficial writers continued to author children’s books, which were often more appealing than adult literature of the time. Word Play focuses on poetry as the primary genre for both children’s and unofficial literature throughout the Soviet period. Five case studies feature poets‐cum‐children’s writers—Leonid Aronzon, Oleg Grigoriev, Igor Kholin, Vsevolod Nekrasov, and Dmitri Prigov—whose unpublished work was not written for children but features lexical and formal elements, abundant humor, and childlike lyric speakers that are aspects of the childlike aesthetic. The book concludes with an exploration of the legacy of this aesthetic in Russian poetry today. Drawing on rich primary sources, Word Play joins a growing literature on Russian children’s books, connecting them to avant-garde poetics in fresh, surprising ways.

In the first full-length study of Wallace Stevens's word-play, Eleanor Cook focuses on Stevens's skillful play with grammar, etymology, allusion, and other elements of poetry, and suggests ways in which this play offers a method of approaching his work. At the same time, this book is a general study of Stevens's poetry, moving from his earliest to his latest work, and includes close readings of three of his remarkable long poems--Esthetique du Mal, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, and An Ordinary Evening in New Haven. The chronological arrangement enables readers to follow Stevens's increasing skill and changing thought in three areas of his "poetry of the earth": the poetry of place, the poetry of eros, and the poetry of belief. Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens shows how, in setting words at play and in conflict, Stevens could upset the usual relations of rhetoric, grammar, and dialectic, and thus the book contributes to the current debate about logical and a-logical uses of language. Cook also places Stevens within the larger context of Western literature, hearing how he speaks to Milton, Keats, and Wordsworth; to such American forebears as Whitman, Emerson, and Dickinson; and to T. S. Eliot, his contemporary. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.