Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors - Bill Bryson [37]
Domenichino. (1581–1641) Italian painter.
Domesday Book. Census of England carried out in 1086; pronounced doomsday.
Dominica. Small (pop. 69,000) Caribbean island state; capital Roseau. Not to be confused with nearby Dominican Republic; capital Santo Domingo.
dominoes.
Dom Pérignon. Champagne.
Donatello. (c. 1386–1466) Italian sculptor, real name Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi.
Donegal. Irish county, but Marquess of Donegall.
Don Giovanni. Opera by Mozart (1787).
Donizetti, Gaetano. (1797–1848) Italian composer.
doorjamb.
doppelganger. (Ger.) A person’s ghostly double.
Doppler effect. The change that occurs in sound waves as the source and the observer move closer together or farther apart, named after Christian Johann Doppler (1803–1853), Austrian physicist.
dormouse for the small rodent, which isn’t actually a mouse at all. The name is thought to be a corruption of the Norman French dormeus, meaning “sleepy.” The plural is dormice.
dos and don’ts. Not do’s.
Dosewallips River, Washington.
Dos Passos, John. (1896–1970) American writer.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, is the commonest spelling of the name of the Russian novelist (1821–1881), but there are many possible variants for both names.
double meanings. Anyone who has written headlines for a living will know the embarrassment that comes from causing hilarity to a large group of people by writing an inadvertently two-faced headline. I have no doubt that someone at the Toronto Globe and Mail is still cringing at having written “Upturns May Indicate Some Bottoms Touched” (cited in Punch), as must earlier have been the author of the oft-quoted and variously attributed “MacArthur Flies Back to Front.” It is always worth remembering that many words carry a range of meanings, or function as both nouns and verbs, and consequently offer unexpected opportunities for mischief.
double negatives. Most people know you shouldn’t say “I haven’t had no dinner,” but some writers, doubtless more out of haste than ignorance, sometimes perpetrate sentences that are scarcely less jarring, as here: “Stranded and uncertain of their location, the survivors endured for six days without hardly a trace of food” (Chicago Tribune). Since hardly, like scarcely, has the grammatical effect of a negative, it requires no further negation. Make it “with hardly.”
Some usage guides flatly condemn all double negatives, but there is one kind, in which a negative in the main clause is paralleled in a subordinate construction, that we might view more tolerantly. Evans cites this sentence from Jane Austen: “There was none too poor or remote not to feel an interest.” And Shakespeare wrote: “Nor what he said, though it lacked form a little, was not like madness.” But such constructions must be considered exceptional. More often the intrusion of a second negative is merely a sign of fuzzy writing. At best it will force the reader to pause and perform some verbal arithmetic, adding negative to negative, as here: “The plan is now thought unlikely not to go ahead” (London Times). At worst it may leave the reader darkly baffled, as in this memorably convoluted sentence from a leading authority: “Moreover…our sense of linguistic tact will not urge us not to use words that may offend or irritate” (Quirk, The Use of English).
Double Top Mountain, New York, but Doubletop Peak, Wyoming.
doubt if, that, whether. Idiom demands some selectivity in the choice of conjunction to introduce a clause after doubt and doubtful. The rule is simple: Doubt that should be reserved for negative contexts (“There is no doubt that…” “It was never doubtful that…”) and interrogative ones (“Do you have any doubt that…?” “Was it ever doubtful that…?”). Whether or if should be used in all others (“I doubt if he will come” “It is doubtful whether the rain will stop”).
doubtless, undoubtedly, indubitably. “Tonight he faces what is doubtlessly the toughest and loneliest choice of his 13-year stewardship of the Palestine Liberation Organization” (Washington Post). Since doubtless can be an adverb as well as an adjective,