Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words - Bill Bryson [29]
fact that. This phrase made Strunk “quiver with revulsion,” and he insisted that it be revised out of every sentence in which it appeared. That may be putting it a trifle strongly, but it is true that the phrase generally signals a sentence that could profitably be recast, as here: “Our arrival was delayed for four hours due to the fact that the ferry failed to arrive” (Sunday Telegraph). Often a simple deletion will do: “Blumenbach, on the other hand, was astutely aware of the fact that apparently closely allied species could differ markedly in the kinds and morphologies of the teeth they possessed” (Science News). Remove “of the fact” and the sentence loses nothing in terms of sense.
fait accompli. French for “an accomplished fact.” The plural is faits accomplis.
Falange, Phalange. The first is a political party in Spain, the second a political party in Lebanon.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux for the publisher.
farther, further. Insofar as the two are distinguished, farther usually appears in contexts involving literal distance (“New York is farther from Sydney than from London”) and further in contexts involving figurative distance (“I can take this plan no further”). But there is, as the OED notes, “a large intermediate class of instances in which the choice between the two forms is arbitrary.”
faux pas. French for an error or blunder. The plural is also faux pas.
faze, meaning to disturb or worry, is sometimes confused with phase, as here: “Christmas Doesn’t Phase Me” (New York Review of Books headline).
feasible. Not -able. The word does not mean probable or plausible, as is sometimes thought, but simply capable of being done. An action can be feasible without being either desirable or likely.
feet, foot. “Accompanied by Interior Secretary Gale Norton, the President also stopped at the 275-feet-high General Sherman Tree, a sequoia thought to be one of the largest living things on Earth” (Los Angeles Times). It is a quirk of English that when one noun qualifies another, the first is normally singular. That is why we talk about toothbrushes rather than teethbrushes and horse races rather than horses races. Exceptions can be found—systems analyst, singles bar—but usually these appear only when the normal form would produce ambiguity. When a noun is not being made to function as an adjective, the plural is the usual form. Thus a wall that is six feet high is a six-foot-high wall. For a discussion of the punctuation distinction, see HYPHEN in the appendix.
fever, temperature. You often hear sentences like “John had a temperature yesterday” when in fact John has a temperature every day. What he had yesterday was a fever. The distinction is not widely observed, even by some medical authorities. Bernstein cites the instance of a Massachusetts hospital that issued a bulletin stating, “Everett has no temperature.” Fowler excused the usage as a “sturdy indefensible,” but even so it is better avoided in careful writing, particularly when the remedy has the virtues of simplicity and brevity.
fewer, less. “In the first four months of the year Rome’s tourists were 700,000 less than in the corresponding period last year” (Guardian). Probably no other pair of words causes more problems, and with less justification, than less and fewer. The generally cited rule is that less applies to quantity and fewer to number. A rougher but more helpful guide is to use less with singular nouns (less money, less sugar) and fewer with plural nouns (fewer houses, fewer doctors). Thus the quotation above should be either “Rome’s tourists [plural noun] were 700,000 fewer” or “the number [singular noun] of tourists was 700,000 less.”
An apparent exception to the rule can be seen here: “. . . but some people earn fewer than $750 a year” (Times). Although $750 is inarguably a plural sum, it functions as a singular. We see it as a totality, not