Description

Among the Language language’s many skilled and beloved writers guides all of us toward precise, mistake-free usage.As usual Bill Bryson says it best: “English is just a dazzlingly idiosyncratic tongue, saturated in quirks and irregularities that often seem willfully at odds with logic and good sense. It is a vocabulary where ‘cleave’ can mean to cut-in half or even to hold two halves together; where the straightforward term ‘set’ has 126 different meanings as a verb, 58 as a noun, and 10 as a participial adjective; where if you can run fast you're moving swiftly, but if you're stuck fast you're not moving at all; [and] where ‘colonel,’ ‘freight,’ ‘once,’ and ‘ache’ are strikingly at odds using their spellings.” Like a copy editor for the London Times in the first 1980s, Bill Bryson felt keenly the possible lack of a straightforward-to-consult, authoritative guide to Preventing the traps and snares in English, and so he brashly suggested to a publisher that he should write one. Interestingly, the proposition was accepted, and for “an amount of cash carefully gauged not to cause embarrassment or feelings of overworth,” he proceeded to create that book–his first, inaugurating his stellar career.Now, ten years and a half later, revised, updated, and thoroughly (but not overly) Americanized, it's become Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words, significantly more than ever an important guide to the wonderfully disordered thing that's the English-Language. With somebody thousand entries, from “a, an” to “zoom,” that feature real world types of questionable usage from a global variety of magazines, and with a helpful glossary and guide to pronunciation, this precise, prescriptive, and–because it's compiled by Bill Bryson–often witty book belongs on the desk of each individual who cares enough concerning the language to not maul or misuse or distort it.From the Hardcover version.