Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words - Bill Bryson [33]
Finally, beware of confusing gauntlet (or gantlet) with gamut (which see).
Gasthaus, Gasthof. The first is German for an inn or guesthouse; the second is German for a hotel. The plurals are Gasthäuser and Gasthöfe.
gendarmes. Some popular dictionaries define gendarmes as French police officers. In fact, gendarmes are soldiers employed in police duties, principally in the countryside. Police officers in French cities and towns are just that—police officers.
gender. “A university grievance committee decided that she had been denied tenure because of her gender” (New York Times). Gender, originally strictly a grammatical term, became in the nineteenth century a euphemism for the convenience of those who found sex too disturbing a word to employ. Its use today in that sense is disdained by many authorities as old-fashioned and overdelicate.
genus, species. The second is a subgroup of the first. The convention is to capitalize the genus but not the species, as in Homo sapiens. The plurals are genera and species. The traditional order of divisions in taxonomy is kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species.
George Town, Georgetown. George Town is the spelling for the capital of the Cayman Islands and the principal city of the island and state of Penang in Malaysia. Almost all others, including the capital of the South American country Guyana and the district and university in Washington, D.C., use the spelling Georgetown.
germane, relevant, material. Germane and relevant are synonymous. Both indicate a pertinence to the matter under discussion. Material has the additional connotation of being necessary. A material point is one without which an argument would be incomplete. A germane or relevant point will be worth noting but may not be essential to the argument.
gerrymander is to distort or redraw to one’s advantage, especially a political boundary. Not to be confused with JERRY-BUILT. The term is adapted from the name of Elbridge Gerry, a Massachusetts governor in the early nineteenth century who did not invent the practice but used it shamelessly. For what it is worth, although Gerry pronounced his name with a hard g (as in gust), gerrymander is normally pronounced with a soft g (as in jerry).
gerunds are verbs made to function as nouns, as with the italicized words in “I don’t like dancing” and “Cooking is an art.” Two problems commonly arise with gerunds.
1. Sometimes the gerund is unnecessarily set off by an article and a preposition, as here: “They said that the valuing of the paintings could take several weeks” (Daily Telegraph). Deleting the italicized words would make the sentence shorter and more forceful.
2. When a possessive noun or pronoun (called a genitive) qualifies a gerund, a common type of construction is “They objected to him coming.” Properly it should be “They objected to his coming.” Similarly, “There is little hope of Smith gaining admittance to the club” should be “There is little hope of Smith’s gaining admittance . . .”
The possessive form is, in short, the preferred form, especially with proper nouns and personal pronouns. For Fowler (who treated the matter under the heading “fused participle”), the possessive was virtually the only form. He insisted, for instance, on “We cannot deny the possibility of anything’s happening” and “This will result in many’s having to go into lodgings.” Most other authorities regard this as a Fowler idiosyncrasy, and the rigor of that position was quietly and sensibly abandoned in the third (and most recent) edition.
Ghanaian for a person or thing from Ghana.
ghettos. Not -oes.
gild the lily. The passage from Shakespeare’s King John is “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily . . ./Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.” Thus it is both wrong and resorting to a woeful cliché to speak of “gilding the