Mary Norris has spent a lot more than three decades in The New Yorker’s copy section, maintaining its celebrated high standards. Right now she brings her huge experience, good cheer, and finely sharpened pencils to help ordinary people in a boisterous vocabulary book as filled with life since it is usually of practical advice. Between You & Me features Norris’s laugh-out-loud descriptions of a few of the most common and vexing complications in spelling, punctuation, and usage-comma faults, danglers, ‘who’ vs. ‘whom,’ ‘that’ about Between You and Me: Confessions of Comma Queen vs. ‘which,’ substance words and phrases, gender-neutral language-and her very clear explanations of how to handle them. Down-to-earth and constantly open-minded, she draws on illustrations from Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Henry Adam, and the Lord’s Prayer, as well as in the Honeymooners, The Simpsons, David Foster Wallace, and Gillian Flynn. She takes us to see a copy of Noah Webster’s groundbreaking Blue-Back Speller, on the quest to learn who put the hyphen in Moby-Dick, on a pilgrimage to the world’s only pencil-sharpener museum, and in the hallowed halls of THE BRAND NEW Yorker and her use such celebrated writers as Pauline Kael, Philip Roth, and George Saunders. Readers-and writers-will find in Norris neither a scold nor a softie but a smart and witty fresh friend in love with vocabulary and alive towards the glories of its make use of in America, even in age autocorrect and spell-check. As Norris writes, ‘The dictionary is an excellent thing, nevertheless, you can’t let it force you around.’