.

"A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down," says the song from "Mary Poppins," and in fact the chapter about language humor draws many of its examples from this delightful movie.

Other chapters address the burning question of how a study of baseball idioms tells us whether baseball is truly THE national pastime (yes), why it's now kosher to split infinitives with abandon, why adverbs are fascinating (really), and why it's important for you to take the appropriate dictionary along when ordering in a restaurant in Germany or Sweden.

"That’s Just the Way It Is" may be purchased at leading online booksellers such as Amazon.com, Borders.com, and BN.com (Barnes and Noble). Since booksellers set their own retail prices, you may want to compare prices.

You may also order the book at brick-and-mortar bookstores. All you need to provide is the author’s name (Sue Coffman), the title, and/or the International Standard Book Number. The ISBN number for "That’s Just the Way It Is" is 0-75960-691-9.

The following tidbits should whet your appetite enough for you to order the entire full-course book.

• In some cases, the best answer to questions about unexplainable points of English grammar and usage is "That's just the way it is." That's the answer to the question of why it's perfectly correct to say "It started raining," "It stopped raining," and "It started to rain,"—but not "It stopped to rain."

• The rule about double negatives is not a natural English rule. It was devised by an amateur (don't try this at home) eighteenth-century grammarian named Robert Lowth. In his 1762 book, he reasoned that in language, as in mathematics, two negatives make a positive.
  
  Up to this time, the use of a double negative to intensify an idea was perfectly acceptable in English—as it still is in many other languages. But today, thanks to Lowth (whom I "Lowth"), we can't use no double negatives and still be accepted in the right crowds.

• Many speakers of English regularly exhibit signs of hyperurbanism in both speaking and writing. No, you can't avoid this problem by moving to the suburbs. Hyperurbanism is a language error resulting from an attempt to be more urbane, polished, and sophisticated. "Hyperurbanites" tend to overcorrect, abandoning their natural—and correct—grammatical patterns in favor of incorrect usage.
  
  One that The Grammar Doctor hears regularly is made by the traffic reporter in a local radio station's helicopter. He must've learned somewhere that constructions such as "You did good" are wrong, so he has subconsciously determined that using "good" after a verb is always wrong. He's a little antsy as he hovers over the city, worrying about his grammar. So he tells his audience, "The situation is looking well," and he probably feels smug about his word choice. Sorry, Charlie. He's hyperurbanized. He should've said, "The situation is looking good."

• The English language has the world's largest vocabulary—more than 600,000 words. Of course we don't use most of these words, for one reason or another, not including laziness. Only about one-third of these words are in common circulation. But compare even this smaller number to about 185,000 in German and 100,000 in French, and you can see why this statistic is so amazing.
  
  Back in the olden days, when English was first spoken (the early form of the language is called Anglo-Saxon, or Old English), the language had a vocabulary of only 30,000 to 50,000 words, so we've been picking up a lot of new words—and discarding many others—over the last thousand years. Most of the words we've borrowed have come from Greek, Latin, and French.

• Many words have changed their meanings, pronunciations, and spellings since Anglo-Saxon times. Word meanings change in some predictable ways. One of these is called degradation (sounds juicy, doesn't it?). "Immoral" once meant "not customary." "Lust" formerly meant simply "pleasure" (and still does in German).
  
  The word "vulgar" has undergone a similar slide. It came into English from the Latin word meaning "common people." A "smirk" was once an innocent smile. "Sly," "crafty," and "cunning" were once synonyms for "skillful." The road to degradation is crowded, but the words moving in the opposite direction are experiencing no traffic jams. I wonder what this trend says about human nature.