Questions You Always Wanted to Ask About English

1973ish (see below), Washington Square Press Book edition
Maxwell Nurnberg
Questions You Always Wanted to Ask About English* * But Were Afraid to Raise Your Hand
Original price $1.25, purchase price unknown
Worn paperback with many pages loose, a few missing
C+

The title is a parody of the 1969 book Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* *But Were Afraid to Ask, with not only the asterisks but the scary topic in red on the cover.  While Dr. Reuben's book taught teenaged me such dubious information as that shoe fetishists like to check into hotel rooms to be alone with their loved objects and, as Wikipedia puts it, "all prostitutes are lesbians and all lesbians are prostitutes," the advice and information in Nurnberg's book is still fairly useful.  True, the latter says, "If I were given to predictions, I would say that in fifty years-- give or take five-- the only form used will be who," and here we are close to forty years later and "whom" still exists in formal English.  And I would fight for the form "Dickens's novels" rather than "Dickens' novels," although I know many who would disagree.  (Just don't say "Dicken's"!)  But his tips on spelling, grammar, and punctuation are generally reliable. 

Among the pages missing are the table of contents and the copyright page, so the book is less useful than it was.  And I'm just guessing on the edition, but there is a Germaine Greer quote (on gender and pronouns) from February 1973, so this can't be the first edition, from '72.  I also suspect, whatever his feelings about the use of "they" as a singular pronoun, he probably wouldn't have said "as every schoolboy knows" in the much later editions.  Hopefully, by '83 he was saying "every schoolchild."  And, yes, I've probably broken a dozen rules of English in this post alone, but he says the most important rule is to write as yourself.

There are several punny quizzes to emphasize his points, for example:
"In which case has the dog the upper paw?
(a) A clever dog knows its master.
(b) A clever dog knows it's master."
The book is readable, although it does get a bit tedious after awhile, as most manuals do.  Even sex manuals?  Well, hang in there till the early '90s and we'll see....