I like words. Big ones. Small ones. Words more ancient than your great-aunt Mary. Best-friends-ever names. A list of two-letter Scrabble(R) words. Words that keep things at a grade six reading level. And I like to string them together to make sentences; sometimes even paragraphs.
Recently, the book "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" was made popular. And so, it's all about the grammar. Not nearly as popular as, but possibly more humourous than, Truss' book is Victor Borge's "Phonetic Punctuation." (See "continued reading" for a demonstration or two.)
But have you ever found yourself pondering which word to use? Further vs. farther? They're, their, there? Calendar or calender? Is there stationary or stationery in the envelop(e)? Affect instead of effect? Lay, lie, lain or lied? Was that a complement or a compliment? There is help ... check out English Language Difficulties for more language confusions.
On a slightly related note, the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has removed over 16,000 hyphens from its pages. What have we lost? The bumble-bee, ice-cream, pigeon-hole, water-bed and cry-baby to name a few. At least one other person has thought about it.