Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words - Bill Bryson [49]
mean, median. Two points to note here. First, each of these terms has a very specific definition, but those definitions don’t necessarily translate abroad. My faithful first edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, for instance, defines mean as the middle point in a series of numbers, but most British dictionaries define mean as the sum of all numbers in a series divided by the number of numbers—in other words, as average—and that is not the same thing at all. Median on both sides of the Atlantic signifies the middle number of an array of numbers arranged in order of magnitude. The second problem, which is not unrelated to the first, is that both terms are at best vaguely understood by the general reader, and thus your most prudent course of action is to use them extremely sparingly in anything other than technical writing.
media is a plural. I can see no logical reason for treating it otherwise, yet increasingly it appears as a singular, even in the most conservative and careful publications, as in this example from The New Yorker: “One reporter, the Wall Street Journal’s Nicholas Kulish, dashed off a petition . . . saying that if the media was barred from the counting room they were prepared to go to court.” Media is a useful umbrella term for print and broadcast interests, but they are clearly plural enterprises and so, I think, should the word be. See also DATA.
melamine for the type of plastic. It is not capitalized.
men’s, women’s. However eagerly department stores and the like may strive to dispense with punctuation in their signs (writing “Mens Clothing” or “Womens Department”), the practice is subliterate and to be avoided in any serious writing. Equally incorrect, if slightly less common, is placing the apostrophe after the s (e.g., “mens’ hats,” “womens’ facials”). However, note that the apostrophe is discarded in such compounds as menswear and womenswear. See also CHILDREN’S; APOSTROPHE (in Appendix).
Messerschmitt, not -schmidt, for the type of aircraft.
metal, mettle. For all his lexicographical genius, Samuel Johnson was not always the most consistent of spellers. It is thanks to him that we have such discordant pairs as deign but disdain and deceit but receipt, among many others. With metal and mettle, however, his inconsistency of spelling was by design. Though both come from the Greek metallon (meaning “a mine”) and before Johnson’s time were often spelled the same, he thought it would be useful to distinguish them. Thus metal is the spelling reserved for chemical elements such as gold and copper and mettle for contexts describing courage or spirit. A common misspelling is seen here: “Market conditions have put the hoteliers on their metal” (Observer).
metaphor, simile. Both are figures of speech in which two things are compared. A simile likens one thing to another, dissimilar one: “He ran like the wind”; “She took to racing as a duck takes to water.” A metaphor acts as if the two compared things are identical and substitutes one for the other. Comparing the beginning of time to the beginning of a day, for instance, produces the metaphor “the dawn of time.”
Much has been written about the perils of mixed metaphors and their potential for inadvertent absurdity, as seen here: “This is a virgin field pregnant with possibilities” (cited by Fowler); “Yet the President has backed him to the hilt every time the chips were down” (cited by Bernstein). The shortcoming of such sentences is not so much that they mix metaphors as that they mix clichés. When neither of the metaphors in a sentence is hackneyed, you might just get away with it—as Shakespeare clearly did when he wrote, “Or to take arms