Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words: A Writer’s Guide to Getting It Right-Quality Guarantee

Description

One of the English language’s most skilled and beloved writers guides us all towardprecise, mistake-free grammar.

As usual Bill Bryson says it best: “English is a dazzlinglyidiosyncratic tongue, full of quirks and irregularities that often seem willfullyat odds with logic and common sense. This is a language where ‘cleave’ can mean tocut in half or to hold two halves together; where the simple word ‘set’ has 126 differentmeanings as a verb, 58 as a noun, and 10 as a participial adjective; where if youcan run fast you are moving swiftly, but if you are stuck fast you are not movingat all; [and] where ‘colonel,’ ‘freight,’ ‘once,’ and ‘ache’ are strikingly at oddswith their spellings.” As a copy editor for the London Times in the early 1980s,Bill Bryson felt keenly the lack of an easy-to-consult, authoritative guide to avoidingthe traps and snares in English, and so he brashly suggested to a publisher thathe should write one. Surprisingly, the proposition was accepted, and for “a sum ofmoney carefully gauged not to cause embarrassment or feelings of overworth,” he proceededto write that book—his first, inaugurating his stellar career.

Now, a decade anda half later, revised, updated, and thoroughly (but not overly) Americanized, ithas become Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words, more than ever an essentialguide to the wonderfully disordered thing that is the English language. With someone thousand entries, from “a, an” to “zoom,” that feature real-world examples ofquestionable usage from an international array of publications, and with a helpfulglossary and guide to pronunciation, this precise, prescriptive, and—because it iswritten by Bill Bryson—often witty book belongs on the desk of every person who caresenough about the language not to maul or misuse or distort it.