This fall I have been teaching a course in Syrian Arabic, and in preparation for this I read Cowell’s excellent A Reference Grammar of Syrian Arabic (1964), more or less cover to cover. This grammar is nothing short of fantastic. It is well organized, fairly easy to read, and it is, above all, comprehensive. Every little nook and cranny of the language seems to be explored and explained, and all is illustrated with authentic data. (Being from 1964, it does, however, contain some examples with words that are no longer in use.) I have a pretty good command of Syrian Arabic, but I have not studied it formally, and when reading this grammar, I had quite a few aha-moments, when quirky bits of the grammar in Syrian Arabic that I had found strange or confusing fell into place. There were also a lot of things I knew intuitively, but that I had never consciously formulated, and that I had not seen formally described. This post is a description of a some things that I found particularity interesting, namely: derived verb forms with the infixes w and r; special forms of numerals for specific nouns; the “-āt of batch”, as I like to call it; the bi-/fī- complementary distribution; variants of demonstrative pronouns; and the three yeses.