Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words - Bill Bryson [68]
self-confessed, as in “a self-confessed murderer,” is usually tautological. In most cases, confessed alone is enough.
sensual, sensuous. The words are only broadly synonymous. Sensual applies to a person’s baser instincts, as distinguished from reason. It should always hold connotations of sexual allure or lust. Sensuous was coined by Milton to avoid those connotations and to suggest instead the idea of being alive to sensations. It should be used when no suggestion of sexual arousal is intended.
sentences, length of. Occasionally a proliferation of connecting words produces a sentence that simply runs away with itself. I offer, without additional comment, the following as a classic of its type: “But dramatic price shifts are not expected by the oil companies because retail prices are already claimed to be about 8p a gallon cheaper than is justified by the drop in crude oil price which anyway because taxation accounts for 70 percent of the price of a retail gallon has a relatively limited impact” (Times).
septuagenarian for a person in his or her seventies. Note the u, which occasionally goes astray, as here: “Even Chairman Mao created his own athletic image with his septagenarian plunge into the Yangtze” (Sunday Times).
Serengeti for the plain and famed national park in Tanzania. Not -getti.
serving, servicing. “Cable TV should be servicing half the country within five years” (Daily Mail). Bulls service cows. Mechanics service faulty machinery. But cable TV systems serve the country. Servicing is reserved for the idea of installation and maintenance. Serve is the better word for describing things that are of general and continuing benefit.
Shakespearean, Shakespearian. The first is the usual spelling in America and the second is the usual spelling in Britain, but, interestingly, don’t look to The Oxford English Dictionary for guidance on any spellings concerning England’s greatest poet. Perversely and charmingly, but entirely unhelpfully, the OED insists on spelling the name Shakspere, a decision it based on one of the six spellings Shakespeare himself used. It does, however, acknowledge that Shakespeare is “perhaps” the commonest spelling now used.
shall, will. Authorities have been trying to pin down the vagaries and nuances of shall and will since the seventeenth century. In The King’s English, the Fowler brothers devote twenty pages to the matter. The gist of what they have to say is that either you understand the distinctions instinctively or you do not; that if you don’t, you probably never will; and that if you do, you don’t need to be told anyway.
The rule most frequently propounded is that to express simple futurity you should use shall in the first person and will in the second and third persons, and to express determination (or volition) you should do the reverse. But by that rule Churchill blundered grammatically when he vowed, “We shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” As did MacArthur when he said at Corregidor, “I shall return.” As have all those who have ever sung “We Shall Overcome.”
The simple fact is that whether you use shall or will in a given instance depends very much on your age and your birthplace and the emphasis with which you mean to express yourself. The English tend to use shall more frequently and more specifically than do the Scots or the Irish or Americans, but even in England the distinctions are rapidly fading and by no means fixed.
In short, it is not possible to make rigid rules to distinguish between the two, and (dare I say it?) the distinctions are no longer all that important anyway.
“Shalott, The Lady of,” for the 1832 poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Not Shallot.
shambles. Used in the sense of a mess or muddle, the word has long been resisted by purists, notably Fowler, who cited this as a slipshod usage: