Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words - Bill Bryson [1]
But at the same time, anything that helps to bring order to the engaging unruliness that is our language is, almost by definition, a good thing. Just as we all agree that clarity is better served if cup represents a drinking vessel and cap something you put on your head, so too, I would submit, the world is a fractionally better place if we agree to preserve a distinction between its and it’s, between “I lay down the law” and “I lie down to sleep,” between imply and infer, forego and forgo, flout and flaunt, anticipate and expect, and countless others.
One of the abiding glories of English is that it has no governing authority, no group of august worthies empowered to decree how words may be spelled and deployed. We are a messy democracy, and all the more delightful for it. We spell eight as we do not because that makes sense, but because that is the way we like to spell it. When we tire of a meaning or usage or spelling—when we decide, for example, that masque would be niftier as mask—we change it, not by fiat but by consensus. The result is a language that is wonderfully fluid and accommodating, but also complex, undirected and often puzzling—in a word, troublesome.
What follows should be regarded less as a book of instruction than as a compilation of suggestions, observations, and even treasured prejudices. Never forget that no one really has the right to tell you how to organize your words. If you wish to say “between you and I” or to use fulsome in the sense of lavish, it is your privilege to do so and you can certainly find ample supporting precedents among many distinguished writers. But you may also find it useful to know that such usages are at variance with that eccentric, ever-shifting corpus known as Good English. Identifying that consensus, insofar as such a thing is possible, is the principal aim of this book.
Some 60 percent of the material is new since the original Dictionary of Troublesome Words. This is not, alas, because I am now 60 percent better informed than I was nearly twenty years ago. In fact, very nearly the reverse. I can’t begin to tell you (or at least I prefer not to tell you) how many times while reviewing the original text I found myself thinking, “I didn’t know that. Why, I’ve been making that mistake for years.” The revisions herein consist largely of elaborations on much that I had forgotten I once knew, and additions concerning matters that have come to my attention since. In an alarmingly real sense, the alternative title now could be Even More Things in English Usage That the Author Wasn’t Entirely Clear About Until Quite Recently.
The book is not—indeed, cannot be—a style guide. Whether to write email or e-mail, NATO or Nato, Vietnam or Viet Nam is, for most users, a question of preference or of house style. Only occasionally, where the weight of usage has shifted in recent years, as with the South American country Suriname (or Surinam), does the book touch on stylistic issues. Nor, except tangentially (and perhaps just a touch idiosyncratically), does it deal with questions of pronunciation. By design the book’s scope is slightly more international than is perhaps typical. It seems to me that as the world shrinks and communications become increasingly global, there is every reason to keep our horizons broad. You might never have an occasion to check whether the Australian eminence is Ayers Rock or Ayer’s Rock or need to distinguish Magdalene College, Cambridge, from Magdalen College, Oxford, but the chances that you will are vastly greater now than they were twenty years ago, and so I have kept such entries in.
Most of the entries that follow are illustrated with questionable usages from leading publications throughout the English-speaking world, and I should point out that the frequency with which some publications are cited has less to do with the quality of their production than with my own reading habits. I have also not hesitated to cite errors committed by the authorities themselves. It is of course