Taking a scenic route in Southeast Iowa is like talking about a good Barry Manilow album. You have to make certain allowances.

I understand cricket - what's going on, the scoring - but I can't understand why.

Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.

Open your refrigerator door, and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the 18th century. The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place, indeed.

Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.

Entirely incidentally, a little-known fact about Shakespeare is that his father moved to Stratford-upon-Avon from a nearby village shortly before his son's birth. Had he not done so, the Bard of Avon would instead be known as the rather less ringing Bard of Snitterfield.

For most of us the rules of English grammar are at best a dimly remembered thing. But even for those who make the rules, grammatical correctitude sometimes proves easier to urge than to achieve. Among the errors cited in this book are a number committed by some of the leading authorities of this century. If men such as Fowler and Bernstein and Quirk and Howard cannot always get their English right, is it reasonable to expect the rest of us to?