Howard Richler is a longtime logophile who has served as a language columnist for several newspapers and magazines. He is the author of seven books on language including: The Dead Sea Scroll Palindromes (1995), Take My Words: A Wordaholic’s Guide to the English Language (1996), A Bawdy Language: How a Second-Rate Language Slept Its Way to the Top (1999), Global Mother Tongue: The Eight Flavours of English (2006), Can I Have a Word with You? (2007), Strange Bedfellows: The Private Livesof Words (2010), and most recently How Happy Became Homosexual: and Other Mysterious Semantic Shifts (2013).