Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words - Bill Bryson [51]
moribund. “Problems in the still-moribund oil tanker business mean there is little sign of recovery on the horizon” (Times). Moribund does not mean sluggish or troubled or struggling, as was intended here and frequently elsewhere. It means dying, on the point of death. To be moribund is to be critically—indeed, irreversibly—ill.
mortar, in the context of weaponry, is the launching device, not the explosive projectile. It is generally better, and sometimes necessary, to write that troops fired mortar rounds (or bombs or shells, etc.) rather than simply that they fired mortars.
most. “Not much grows at Himalayan altitudes, so . . . garlic, ginger, and chili peppers flavor most everything” (New Yorker). Unless you are striving for an air of aw-shucks folksiness, most as an adverb should be confined to signifying the topmost degree (“the most delicious cake”) or as a synonym for very (“your offer is most welcome”). As an alternative for almost or nearly, as in the example above, it is at best informal.
motiveless. “French police have intensified their search for the killer in the motiveless murder of a Parisian housewife and her three children yesterday” (Times). Motiveless is a presumptuous, and potentially dangerous, word in many contexts. Who is to say at an early stage of an investigation that a murder was committed without motive? At the very least, make it “apparently motiveless.”
mucous, mucus, mucosa. The first is the adjectival form, the second the noun form. Thus mucus is the substance secreted by the mucous membranes. A more formal name for the latter is mucosa.
munch. “The most coveted invitation on a Sunday in Washington is to the Lombardi Room . . . where pols, power brokers, and media biggies munch hot dogs” (New York Times). Most dictionaries define munch as to eat with a pronounced crunching sound, so it is better not to apply it to soft, comparatively noiseless food like hot dogs.
Muscovite for a person from Moscow. The name comes from the ancient principality of Muscovy.
“Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast” is the correct quotation from the Congreve play The Mourning Bride. It is not “the savage breast” or “a savage beast” or any of the other variants sometimes attributed to it.
mutual, common. Many authorities continue to insist, with varying degrees of conviction, that mutual should be reserved for describing reciprocal relationships between two or more things and not loosely applied to those things held in common. Thus, if you and I like each other, we have a mutual friendship. But if you and I both like Shakespeare, we have a common admiration. The use of mutual in the sense of common has been with us since the sixteenth century and was given a notable boost in the nineteenth with the appearance of the Dickens novel Our Mutual Friend. Most authorities accept it when common might be interpreted as a denigration, but even so, in its looser sense the word is generally better avoided. It is, at all events, more often than not superfluous, as here: “They hope to arrange a mutual exchange of prisoners” (Daily Telegraph). An exchange of anything can hardly be other than mutual.
Muzak (capital M) for the piped music associated with hotel elevators and the like.
myself. Except when it is used for emphasis (“I’ll do it myself”) or reflexively (“I cut myself while shaving”), myself is almost always timorous and inapt. In the following two examples, the better word is inserted in brackets: “Give it to John or myself [me]”; “My wife and myself [I] would just like to say . . .”
N
National Institutes of Health. Note Institutes, plural.
naught, nought. Although dictionaries increasingly treat the words as interchangeable, traditionally the first means nothing (as in “his efforts came to naught