Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words - Bill Bryson [0]
Title Page
Introduction
Troublesome Words
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z
Appendix: Punctuation
Bibliography and Suggested Reading
Glossary
About the Author
By Bill Bryson
Intro to Excerpt
An Excerpt from Bill Bryson’s At Home
Outro from Excerpt
Copyright Page
introduction
The physicist Richard Feynman once remarked that every time a colleague from the humanities department complained that his students couldn’t spell a common word like seize or accommodate, Feynman wanted to reply, “Then there must be something wrong with the way you spell it.”
There is something in what he said. English is a merry confusion of quirks and irregularities that often seem willfully at odds with logic and common sense. This is a language where cleave can mean to cut in half or to hold two halves together; where the simple word set has 126 meanings as a verb, 58 as a noun, and 10 as a participial adjective; where if you run fast you are moving swiftly, but if you are stuck fast you are not moving at all; where colonel, freight, once, and ache, among many thousands of others, have pronunciations that are strikingly at odds with their spellings; where some Latin plurals are treated always as singular (agenda) and some are treated always as plural (criteria) and some (data, media) are regarded by some careful users as plural and by others as singular. I could go on and on. Indeed, in the pages that follow I do.
In many ways the text contained here represents not so much a new edition of an old book as a new edition of an old author. When I put together The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words (as it then was) in 1983, I was a young copy editor on the London Times, and it was a fundamental part of my job to be sensitive to and particular about points of usage. It was why they employed me, after all, and I took the responsibility seriously.
So seriously, in fact, that when I realized there were vast expanses of English usage—linguistic Serengetis—that I was not clear about at all, I wrote to a kindly editor at Penguin Books named Donald McFarlan and impetuously suggested that there was a need for a simple, concise guide to the more confusing or problematic aspects of the language and that I was prepared to undertake it. To my astonishment and gratification, Mr. McFarlan sent me a contract and, by way of advance, a sum of money carefully gauged not to cause embarrassment or feelings of overworth. Thus armed, I set about trying to understand this wonderfully disordered thing that is the English language.
As I observed in the first edition, the book that resulted might more accurately, if less convincingly, have been called A Guide to Everything in English Usage That the Author Wasn’t Entirely Clear About Until Quite Recently. Nearly everything in it arose as the product of questions encountered during the course of daily newspaper work. Should it be “fewer than 10 percent of voters” or “less than 10 percent”? Does someone have “more money than her” or “than she”?
The answers to such questions are not always easily found. Seeking the guidance of colleagues, I discovered, is dangerous: raise almost any point of usage with two journalists and you will almost certainly get two confident but contradictory answers. Traditional reference works are often little more helpful, because they so frequently assume from the reader a familiarity with the intricacies of grammar that is—in my case, at any rate—generous. Because of such difficulties, many users of English continue to make usage decisions based on little more than durable superstitions and half-formed understandings. Many, for example, doggedly avoid split infinitives in the conviction that it endows their sentences with superior grammar. (It does not.) Others avoid hopefully as if it were actively infectious and instead write the more cumbrous “it is hoped” to satisfy an obscure point of syntax that I suspect few of them could elucidate. Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing