[.ca] Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language (ISBN 0192806378)

The perfect bathroom book for English-language junkies.:
"Companion" well describes this book. People who love English for its own sake can flip open any page and start reading, and soon find themselves cross-referencing through the whole volume (and learning a lot). Not as essential as a dictionary or style guide, but a way to broaden your understanding of this marvellous, terrifying language and its relatives. For true language junkies, this is not for the bookshelf, but for the bathroom, to read in bits at leisure.

The Oxford Companion to the English Language:
There are many things I would like to know about the English Language, but too few of them are here. For example the history of English is disposed of in three pages. I should have liked to have seen 30 or so. To be sure there are other historical entries, though insufficient cross referencing. The chronology following the above entry is largely of English history rather than of language history. In place of these things are pages of information one could do without; trivia relating to broadcasting or editions of dictionaries. A topical index would have been nice. Every true philologist will nonetheless want this work.

Everything you need to know about literary terminology:
This book is one of the better purchases I have ever made. Every time I need a detail about the English language, literary devices and terminology, or grammatical usage, this book always has a couple of paragraphs to explain what I need to know -- and usually a handful of cross references to related topics. All with the usual careful and thorough treatment you expect from Oxford. Every library should have a copy of this book.