Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words - Bill Bryson [53]
nerve-racking. Not -wracking. See RACK, WRACK.
new. Perhaps no word appears superfluously in text more often than new, as in each of these examples: “New chairman named at Weir Group” (Financial Times headline); “Yet another Steven Spielberg film seems poised to set new records at the box office when it opens next week” (Chicago Tribune); “The search for new breakthroughs seems to have spurred extra spending in recent years” (Newsweek). Scientists would hardly be searching for old breakthroughs, nor a film poised to set old records, nor a company naming an old chairman. Nearly always the sense of newness is implicit, and the word can be deleted without loss. This rare double from the New York Times shows at a glance just how vacuous the word often is: “New boom for Florida creates new concerns.”
niceish is the spelling for something that is rather nice.
nincompoop. Not nim-.
noisome has nothing to do with noise or noisiness. It is related to annoy and means offensive or objectionable, and is most often used to describe unpleasant smells.
none. The widely held belief that none must always be singular is a myth. Since Fowler, Bernstein, Howard, Gowers, Partridge, the Evanses, the Morrises, Follett, The Oxford English Dictionary, the American Heritage, Random House, and Webster’s New World dictionaries, and many others have already made this point, I do not suppose that the addition of my own small voice to the chorus will make a great deal of difference.
Whether you treat none as a singular or a plural, you should at least be consistent throughout the sentence, as this writer was not: “None of her friends, she says, would describe themselves as a feminist” (Guardian). Make it either “would describe themselves as feminists” or “would describe herself as a feminist.”
A more notable inconsistency, if only because it comes from a respected authority, is seen here: “The total vocabulary of English is immense and runs to about half a million items. None of us as individuals, of course, knows more than a fairly limited number of these, and uses even less” (Professor Randolph Quirk, The Use of English). “None of us . . . uses even less”? The sentence appears to be telling us that nobody uses fewer words than he knows, which is, unfortunately, the opposite of what the author intended. It would be better if we made it “and we use even less,” and better still if we made it “and we use even fewer.”
non sequitur is the Latin for “it does not follow” and means the combination of two or more statements that are jarringly unrelated, as in “He was born in Liverpool and his shoes were brown.” Non sequiturs are most often encountered in newspapers, where constructions such as the following are common: “Slim, of medium height, and with sharp features, Mr. Smith’s technical skills are combined with strong leadership qualities” (New York Times). What, we might ask, do Mr. Smith’s height and features have to do with his leadership qualities? The answer, of course, is not a thing. When non sequiturs are not intrusive and annoying, they are often just absurd, as here: “Dyson’s catch of Clarke was unbelievable, the best catch I’ve seen. And the one before it was just as good” (Sydney Daily Telegraph, cited in Punch).
normalcy is widely and perhaps even a little reflexively condemned in Britain as an inelegant Americanism. Its coinage is often attributed to President Warren G. Harding, who did indeed promise voters “a return to normalcy” as part of one of his campaign pledges, but in fact the word predates Harding by several centuries and arose in Britain. Although most dictionaries accept it as standard, it is still derided as a casualism by many authorities, who suggest normality instead.
not. Sometimes when writers invert the normal word order of a sentence to place greater emphasis on not, they present the reader