A journalist, teacher at St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H., and public-radio commentator, Lederer (Anguished English; Get Thee to a Punnery) again adroitly mixes instruction with hilarity by showing that English, though the richest and most widely used of all the world's languages, is "crazy." The text is a dazzling collection of anagrams, alliterations, idioms, illogical spelling rules (bough, ghost, honor, rhyme) and larky oxymora (Chaucer's classic "hateful good," today's "military intelligence," "postal service") . Verses, quizzes and anecdotes accompany Lederer's essays on "the antics of semantics," greatly expanding the pleasure of what he correctly claims is "the ultimate joy ride through our language."