Bill Bryson

From Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson (1990):

To be fair, English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled. [p. 1]
The richness of the English vocabulary, and the wealth of available synonyms, means that English speakers can often draw shades of distinctions unavailable to non-English speakers. The French, for instance, cannot distinguish between house and home, between mind and brain, between man and gentleman, between "I wrote" and "I have written". The Spanish cannot differentiate a chairman from a president, and the Italians have no equivalent of wishful thinking. [...] English, as Charlton Laird has noted, is the only language that has, or needs, books of synonyms like Roget's Thesaurus. [...]
On the other hand, other languages have facilities we lack. Both French and German can distinguish between knowledge that results from recognition (respectively connaître and kennen) and knowledges that results from understanding (savoir and wissen). [...] All the Romance languages can distinguish between something that leaks into and something that leaks out of. The Italians even have a word for the mark left on a table by a moist glass (culacino) while the Gaelic speakers of Scotland, not to be outdone, have a word for the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whisky. (Wouldn't they just?) It's sgriob. And we have nothing in English to match the Danish hyge (meaning "instantly satisfying and cosy"), [...] so we must borrow the term from them or do without the sentiment.
[...] The Italians, as we might expect, have over 500 names for different types of macaroni. Some of these, when translated, begin to sound distinctly unappetizing, like strozzapreti, which means "strangled priests". Vermicelli means "little worms" and even spaghetti means "little strings". When you learn that muscatel in Italian means "wine with flies in it", you may conclude that the Italians are gastronomically out to lunch, so to speak, but really their names for foodstuffs are no more disgusting than the American hot dogs or those old English favourites, toad-in-the-hole, spotted dick, and faggots in gravy.
[p. 3-5]
These achievements [the translation of various ancient scripts] are all the more remarkable when you consider that often they were made using the merest fragments -- of ancient Thracian, an important language spoken over a wide area until as recently as the Middle Ages, we have just twenty-five words -- and in the face of remarkable indifference on the part of the ancient Greeks and Romans, neither of whom bothered to note the details of a single other language. The Romans even allowed Etruscan, a language that had greatly contributed to their own, to be lost, so that today Etruscan writings remain tantalizingly untranslated. [p. 21]
A vital adjunct to language is the gesture, which in some cultures can almost constitute a vocabulary all its own. Modern Greek has more than seventy common gestures, ranging from the chopping off the forearm gesture, which signifies extreme displeasure, to several highly elaborate ones, such as placing the left hand on the knee, closing one eye, looking into the middle distance and wagging the free hand up and down, which means "I don't want anything to do with it". [p. 28]
And yet for all its grammatical complexity Old English is not quite as remote from modern English as it sometimes appears. Scip, bæð, bricg, and þæt might look wholly foreign but their pronunciations -- respectively "ship", "bath", "bridge", and "that" -- have not altered in a thousand years. [...] You also find that in terms of sound values Old English is a much simpler and more reliable language with every letter distinctly and invariably related to a single sound. There were none of the silent letters or phonetic inconsistencies that bedevil modern English spelling. [p. 43]
Today we have two demonstrative pronouns, this and that, but in Shakespeare's day there was a third, yon, which denoted a further distance than that. You could talk about this hat, that hat, and yon hat. Today the world survives as a colloquialism, yonder, but our speech is fractionally impoverished for its loss.
(Other languages possess even further degrees of thatness. As Pei notes, "The Cree Indian language has a special that [for] things just gone out of sight, while Ilocano, a tongue of the Philippines, has three words for this referring to a visible object, a fourth for things not in view and a fifth for things that no longer exist." [Mario Pei, The Story of Language, 1949, p. 251])
[...] Originally, thou was to you as in French tu is to vous. Thou signified either close familiarity or social inferiority, while you was the more impersonal and general term. In European languages to this day choosing between the two forms can present a very real social agony. As Jespersen, a Dane who appreciated these things, put it: "English has thus attained the only manner of address worthy of a nation the respects the elementary rights of each individual." [Otto Jespersen, The Growth and Structure of the English Language, 1956, p. 251]
[p. 56]
If you have a morbid fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth, there is a word for it: arachibutyrophobia. There is a word to decribe the state of being a woman: muliebrity. And there's a word to describe the sudden breaking off of thought: aposiopesis. If you harbour an urge to look through the windows of the homes you pass, there is a word for the condition: crytoscopophilia. When you are just dropping off to sleep and you experience that sudden sensation of falling, there is a word for it: myoclonic jerk. If you want to say that a word has a circumflex on its penultimate syllable, without saying flat out that it has a circumflex there, there is a word for it: properispomenon. [...] In English, in short, there are words for almost everything.
Some of these words deserve to be better known. Take velleity, which describes a mild desire, a wish or urge too mild to lead to action. Doesn't that seem a useful term? [...] Or ugsome, a late medieval word meaning loathsome or disgusting. [...] Our dictionaries are full of such words -- words describing the most specific of conditions, the most improbable of contingencies, the most arcane of distinctions.
And yet there are odd gaps. We have no word for coolness corresponding to warmth. We are strangely lacking in middling terms -- words to describe with some precision the middle ground between hard and soft, near and far, big and little. We have a possessive impersonal its to place alongside his, hers, and their, but no equivalent impersonal pronoun to contrast with the personal whose. Thus we have to rely on inelegant constructions such as "the house whose roof" or resort to periphrasis. Ruthless was once companioned by ruth, meaning compassion. [...] But, as with many such words, one form died and another lived. Why this should be is beyond explanation. Why should we have lost demit (send away) but saved commit? Why should impede have survived while the once equally common and seemingly just as useful expede expired? No one can say.
[...] It has been said that English is unique in possessing a synonym for each level of our culture: popular, literary, and scholarly -- so that we can, according to our background and cerebral attainments, rise, mount, or ascend a stairway, shrink in fear, terror, or trepidation, and think, ponder, or cogitate upon a problem. This abundance in terms is often cited as a virtue. And yet a critic could equally argue that English is an untidy and acquisitive lanugage, cluttered with a plethora of needless words. After all, do we really need fictile as a synonym for mouldable, glabrous for hairless, sternutation for sneezing? Jules Feiffer once drew a strip cartoon in which the down-at-heel character observed that first he was called poor, then needy, then deprived, then underprivileged, and then disadvantaged, and concluded that although he still didn't have a dime he sure had acquired a fine vocabulary.
[p. 60-62]
[...] We can talk about fine art, fine gold, a fine edge, feeling fine fine hair, and a court fine and mean quite separate things. The condition of having multiple meanings is known as polysemy, and it is very common. [...] But the polysemic champion must be set. Superficially it looks like a wholly unassuming monosyllable [...] Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participal adjective. Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the OED [Oxford English Dictionary] 60,000 words -- the length of a short novel -- to discuss them all. A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know set is to know English.
Sometimes, just to heighten the confusion, the same word ends up with contradictory meanings. This kind of word is called a contronym. Sanction, for example, can either signify permission to do something or a measure forbidding it to be done. Cleave can mean cut in half or stick together. [...] Something that is fast is either stuck firmly or moving quickly.
[p. 62-63]
Occasionally a single root gave birth to triplets, as with cattle, chattel, and capital, hotel, hostel, and hospital, and strait, straight, and strict. There is at least one quadruplet -- jaunty, gentle, gentile, genteel, all from the Latin gentilis -- though there may be more. Bu the record holder is almost certainly the Latin discus, which has given us disk, disc, dish, desk, dais, and, of course, discus. (But having said that, one native Anglo-Saxon root, bear, has given birth to more than forty words, from birth to born to burden.)
[...] We in the English-speaking world are actually sometimes better at looking after our borrowed words than the parents were. Quite a number of words that we've absorbed no longer exist in their place of birth. For instance, the French do not use nom de plume, double entendre, panache, bon viveur, legerdemain (literally "light of hand"), or R.S.V.P. for répondez s'il vous plaît. (Instead they write: "Prière de répondre.") The Italians do not use brio and although they do use al fresco, to them it signifies not being outside but being in prison.
Many of the words we take in are so artfully anglicized that it can be a surprise to learn they are not native. Who would guess that our word puny was once the Anglo-Norman puis né or that curmudgeon may once have been the French cœur méchant (evil heart) [...] while bankrupt was taken literally from the Italian expression banca rotta. meaning "broken bench". In the Middle Ages, when banking was evolving in Italy, transactions were conducted in open-air markets. When a banker became insolvent his bench was broken up. [...] the Gaelic sionnachuighim was knocked into shenanigan and the Amerind raugroughcan became racoon.
[...] One of our more inexplicable habits is the tendency to keep the Anglo-Saxon noun but to adopt a foreign form for the adjectival form. Thus fingers are not fingerish; they are digital. Eyes are not eyeish; they are ocular. English is unique in the tendency to marry a native noun to an adopted adjective. Among other such pairs are mouth|oral, water|aquatic, house|domestic, moon|lunar, son|filial, sun|solar, town|urban. This is yet another perennial source of puzzlement for anyone learning English. Sometimes, a Latinate adjective was adopted but the native one kept as well, so that we can choose between, say, earthly and terrestrial, motherly and maternal, timely and temporal.
Although English is one of the great borrowing tongues -- deriving at least half of its common words from non-Anglo-Saxon stock -- others have been even more enthusiastic in adopting foreign terms. In Armenian, only 23 per cent of the words are of native origin, while in Albanian the proportion is just 8 per cent.
[p. 67-68]
Words change by doing nothing. That is, the word stays the same but the meaning changes. Surprisingly often the meaning becomes its opposite or something very like it. Counterfeit once meant a legitimate copy. Brave once implied cowardice -- as indeed bravado still does. (Both come from the same source as depraved.) Crafty, not a disparaging term, originally was a word of praise, while enthusiasm, which is now a word of praise, was once a term of mild abuse. Zeal has lost its original pejorative sense, but zealot curiously has not. Garble once meant to sort out, not to mix up. A harlot was once a boy, and a girl in Chaucer's day was any young person, whether male or female. Manufacture, from the Latin root for hand, once signified something made by hand; it now means virtually the opposite. Politician was originally a sinister word (perhaps, on second thoughts, it still is), while obsequious and notorious simply meant flexible and famous. Simeon Potter notes that when James II first saw St Paul's Cathedral he called it amusing, awful and artificial, and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice.
This drift of meaning, technically called catachresis, is as widespread as it is curious. Egregious once meant eminent or admirable. In the sixteenth century, for no reason we know of, it began to take on the opposite sense of badness and unworthiness [...] Now, however, it seems that people are increasingly using it in the sense not of bad or shocking, but of simply being pointless and unconstructive.
[...] A word that shows just how widespread these changes can be is nice, which is first recorded in 1290 with the meaning of stupid and foolish. Seventy-five years later Chaucer was using it to mean lascivious and wanton. Then at various times over the next 400 years it came to mean extravagant, elegant, strange, slothful, unmanly, luxurious, modest, slight, precise, thin, shy, discriminating, dainty, and -- by 1769 -- pleasant and agreeable. The meaning shifted so frequently and radically that it is now often impossible to tell in what sense it was intended, as when Jane Austen wrote to a friend, "You scold me so much in a nice long letter ... which I have received from you".
[p. 71-72]
What is the most common vowel in English? Would you say it is the o of hot, the a of cat, the e of red, the i of in, the u of up? In fat, it is none of these. It isn't even a standard vowel sound. It the the colourless murmur of the schwa, represented by the symbol [ə] and appearing as one or more of the vowel sounds in words without number. It is the sound of i in animal, of e in enough, of the middle o in orthodox, of the second, fourth, fifth, and sixth vowels in inspirational, and of at least one of the vowels in almost every multisyllabic word in the language. It is everywhere.
[p. 77]
If there is one thing certain aboout English pronunciation it is that there is almost nothing certain about it. No other langauge in the world has more words spelled the same way and yet pronounced differently. Consider just a few:
heard - beard
road - broad
five - give
early - dearly
beau - beauty
steak - streak
ache - moustache
low - how
doll - droll
scour - four
grieve - sieve
paid - said
break - speak
In some languages, such as Finnish, there is a neat one-to-one correspondence between sound and spelling. A k to the Finns is always "k", and l eternally and comfortingly "l". But in English pronunciation is so various -- one might say random -- that not one of our twenty-six letters can be relied on for constancy. Either they clasp to themselves a variety of pronunciations, as with the c in race, rack, and rich, or they sulk in silence, like the b in debt, the a in bread, the second t in thistle. In combinations they become even more unruly and unpredictable, most famously in the letter cluster ough, which can be pronounced in any of eight ways -- as in through, though, thought, tough, plough, thorough, hiccough, and lough (an Irish-English word for lake or loch, pronounced roughly as the latter). [What about cough? In Australian English hiccough is pronounced 'hiccup' -- Fred] The pronunciation possibilities are so various that probably not one English speaker in a hundred could pronounce with confidence the name of a crowlike bird called the chough. (It's chuff.) Two words in English, hegemony and phthisis, have nine pronunciations each.
[p. 77-78]
In southern Utah, around St George, there is a pocket where people speak a peculiar dialect called (no one seems quite sure why) Dixie, whose principal characteristics are the reversal of "ar" and "or" sounds, so that a person from St George doesn't park his car in a carport, but rather porks his core in a corepart. The bright objects in the night sky are stores, while the heroine of The Wizard of Oz is Darthy. When someone leaves a door open, Dixie speakers don't say, "Where you born in a barn?" They say, "Were you barn in a born?"
[p. 97]
What accounts for all the regional variations? [...] There is certainly no shortage of theories, some of which may be charitably described as being less than half-baked. [...] Robert Hendrickson in America Talk cites the interesting theory that the New York accent may come from Gaelic. The hallmark of this accent is of course the "oi" diphthong as in "thoidy-thoid" for thirty-third and "moider" for murder, and Hendrickson points out that oi appears in many Gaelic words, such as taoisach (the Irish term for prime-minister). However, there are one or two considerations that suggest this theory may need further work. First, oi is not pronounced "oy" in Gaelic; taoisach is pronounced "tea-sack". Second, there is no tradition of converting "ir" sounds to "oi" ones in Ireland, such as would result in murder becoming "moider". And third, most of the Irish immigrants to New York didn't speak Gaelic anyway.
[p. 99]
Every language has its quirks and all languages, for whatever reason, happily accept conventions and limitations that aren't necessarily called for. In English, for example, we don't have words like fwost or zpink or abtholve because we never normally combine those letters to make those sounds, though there's no reason why we couldn't if we wanted to. We just don't. Chinese takes this matter of self-denial to extremes, particularly in the variety of the language spoken in the capital, Peking. All Chinese dialects are monosyllabic -- which can itself be almost absurdly limiting -- but the Pekingese dialect goes a step further and demands that all words end in an "n" or "ng" sound. As a result, there are so few phonetic possibilities in Pekingese that each sound must represent on average seventy words. Just one sound, "yi", can stand for 215 separate words. Partly the Chinese get around this by using rising and falling pitches to vary the sounds fractionally, but even so in some dialects a falling "i" sound can still represent almost forty unrelated words. We use pitch in English to a small extent, as when we differentiate between "oh" and "oh?" and "oh!" but essentially we function be relying on a pleasingly diverse range of sounds.
Almost everyone agrees that English possesses more sounds than almost any other language, though few agree on just how many sounds that might be. [...] the American Heritage Dictionary lists forty-five sounds for purely English terms, plus a further half dozen for foreign terms. Italian, by contrast, uses only about half as many sounds, a mere twenty-seven, while Hawaiian gets by with just thirteen.
[p. 79]
A somewhat extreme example of the process is the naval shortening of forecastle to fo'c'sle, but the tendency to compress is as old as language itself. Daisy was once day's eye, shepherd was sheep herd, lord was loafward, every was everich, fortnight was fourteen-night. [...] With the disappearance of the halfpenny, the English are now denied the rich satisfaction of compressing halfpennyworth into haypth. [p. 81]
[Compare: "She called in and bought some bread and six-penn'orth of garlic sausage [...]", from Chapter 5 of "The Harp in the South" by Ruth Park]
Just as a quick test, see if you can tell which of the following words are mispelled.
supercede
conceed
idiosyncracy
concensus
accomodate
impressario
rhythym
opthalmologist
diptheriea
anamoly
afficianado
caesarian
grafitti
In fact, they all are. So was misspelled at the end of the preceeding paragraph. So was preceding just there. I'm sorry, I'll stop. But I trust you get the point that English can be a maddeningly difficult language to spell correctly.
[...] To be fair, English does benefit from the absence of diacritical marks. These vary from language to language, but in some they play a crucial, and often confusing, role. In Hungarian, for instance, tȍke means capital, but töke means testicles. Szár means stem, but take away the accent and it becomes the sort of word you say when you hit your thumb with a hammer. [...]
A mere 3 per cent of our words may be orthographically troublesome, but they include some doozies, as one might say. Almost any argument in defence of English spelling begins to look a trifle flimsy when you consider anomalies such as colonel, a word that clearly contains no r and yet proceeds as if it did, or ache, bury, and pretty, all of which are pronounced in ways that pay the scantest regard to their spellings, or four and forty, one of which clearly has a u and the other of which clearly doesn't. In fact, all the "four" words -- four, fourth, fourteen, twenty-four, and so on -- are spelled with a u until we get to forty when suddenly the u disappears. Why?
As with most things, there are any number of reasons for all of these. Sometimes our curious spellings are simply a matter of carelessness. That is why, for instance, abdomen has an e but abdominal doesn't, why hearken has an e but hark doesn't. Colonel is perhaps the classic example of this orthographic waywardness. The word comes from the old French coronelle, which the French adapted from the Italian colonello (from which we get colonnade). When the word first came into English in the mid-sixteenth century, it was spelled with an r, but gradually the Italian spelling and pronunciation began to challenge it. For a century or more both spellings and pronunciations were common, until finally with inimitable illogic we settled on the French pronunciation and Italian spelling.
The matter of the vanishing u from forty is more problematic. Chaucer spelled it with a u, as indeed did most people until the end of the seventeenth century, and some for a century or so after that. But then, as if by universal decree, it just quietly vanished. No one seems to have remarked on it at the time. [...]
Usually in English we strive to preserve the old spelling at almost any cost to logicality. Take ache. The spelling seems desperately inconsistent today, as indeed it is. Up until Shakespeare's day, ache was pronounced aitch when it was a noun. As a verb, it was pronounced ake -- but also, rather sensibly, was spelled ake. This tendency to fluctuate between "ch" and "k" sounds was once fairly common. It accounts for such pairs as speech|speak, stench|stink, and stitch|stick. But ache, for reasons that defy logic, adopted the verb pronunciation and the noun spelling.
[...] The Normans certainly did not hesitate to introduce changes they felt more comfortable with, such as substituting qu for cw. Had William the Conqueror been turned back at Hastings, we would spell queen as cwene. The letters z and g were introduced and the Old English þ and ð were phased out. [...]
[...] When at last Anglo-Norman died out and English words rushed in to take their place in official and literary use, it sometimes happened that people adopted the spelling used in one part of the country and the pronunciation used in another. That is why we use the western English spellings for busy and bury, but give the first the London pronunciation "bizzy" and the second the Kentish pronunciation "berry". Similarly, if you've ever wondered how on earth a word spelled one could be pronounced "wun" and once could be "wunce", the answer in both cases is that Southern pronunciations attached themselves to East Midland spellings. Once they were pronounced more or less as spelled -- i.e. "oon" and "oons".
Even without the intervention of the Normans, there is every reason to suppose that English spelling would have been a trifle erratic. Largely this is because for a very long time people seemed emphatically indifferent to matters of consistency in spelling. There were exceptions. As long ago as the early thirteenth century a monk named Orm was calling for a more logical and phonetic system for English spelling. (His proposals, predictably, were entirely disregarded, but they tell scholars more about the pronunciation of the period than any other surviving document.) Even so, it is true to say that most people throughout much of the history of the English language have seemed remarkably unconcerned about the niceties of spelling -- even to the point of spelling one word two ways in the same sentence, as in the description of James I by one of his courtiers, in which just eight words come between two spellings of clothes: "He was of a middle stature, more corpulent though in his clothes than in his body, yet fat enough, his cloathes being ever made larger and easie ..." Even more remarkably perhaps, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words by Robert Cawdrey, published in 1604 and often called the first English dictionary, spelled words two ways on the title page. [David Crystal, Who Cares about English Usage?, 1984, p. 204]
[...] Before 1400, it was possible to tell with some precision where in Britain a letter or manuscript was written just from the spellings. By 1500, this had become all but impossible. The development that changed everything was the invention of the printing press. This brought a much-needed measure of uniformity to English spelling -- but at the same time guaranteed that we would inherit one of the most bewilderingly inconsistent spelling systems in the world.
[p. 112-117]
Consider the parts of speech. In Latin, the verb has up to 120 inflections. In English it never has more than five (e.g. see, sees, saw, seeing, seen) and often gets by with just three (hit, hits, hitting). [...] According to any textbook, the present tense of the verb drive is drive. Every secondary school pupil knows that. Yet if we say, "I used to drive to work but now I don't", we are clearly using the present tense drive in the past tense sense. Equally if we say, "I will drive you to work tomorrow", we are using it in a future sense. And if we say, "I would drive if I could afford to", we are using it in a conditional sense. In fact, almost the only form of sentence in which we cannot use the present tense form for drive is, yes, the present sense. When we need to indicate an action going on right now, we must use the participial form driving. We don't say, "I drive the car now", but rather, "I'm driving the car now". Not to put too fine a point on it, the labels are largely meaningless.
[p. 125]
English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminologies are based on Latin -- a language with which it has precious little in common. [...] Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football. It is a patent absurdity. But once this insane notion became established grammarians found themselves having to draw up ever more complicated and circular arguments to accommodate the inconsistencies. As Burchfield notes in The English Language, one authority, F. Th. Visser, found it necessary to devote 200 pages to discussing just one aspect of the present participle. That is as crazy as it is amazing.
[p. 128]
Consider the curiously persistent notion that sentences should not end with a preposition. The source of the stricture, and several other equally dubious ones, was one Robert Lowth, an eighteenth-century clergyman and amateur grammarian whose A Short Introduction to English Grammar, published in 1762, enjoyed a long and distressingly influential life both in his native England and abroad. It is to Lowth we can trace many a pedant's more treasured notions: the belief that you must say different from rather than different to or different than, the idea that two negatives make a positive, the rule that you must not say "the heaviest of the two objects", but rather, "the heavier", the distinction between shall and will, and the clearly nonsensical belief that between can only apply to two things and among to more than two.
[p. 132-133]
Until the eighteenth century it was correct to say "you was" if you were referring to one person. It sounds off today, but the logic is impeccable. Was is a singular verb and were a plural one. Why should you take a plural verb when the sense is clearly singular? The answer -- surprise, surprise -- is that Robert Lowth didn't like it. "I'm hurrying, are I not?" is hopelessly ungrammatical, but "I'm hurrying, aren't I?" -- merely a contraction of the same words -- is perfect English. [...] There's no inherent reason why these things should be so. They are not defensible in terms of grammar They are because they are.
Nothing illustrates the scope for prejudice in English better than the issue of a split infinitive. Some people feel ridiculously strongly about it. When the British Conservative politician Jock Bruce-Gardyne was economic secretary to the Treasury in the early 1980s, he returned unread any departmental correspondence containing a split infinitive. (It should perhaps be pointed out that a split infinitive is one in which an adverb comes between to and a verb, as in to quickly look.) I can think of two very good reasons for not splitting an infinitive:
1. Because you feel the rules of English ought to conform to the grammatical precepts of a language that died a thousand years ago.
2. Because you wish to cling to a pointless affectation of usage that is without the support of any recognized authority of the last 200 years, even at the cost of composing sentences that are ambiguous, inelegant, and patently contorted.
[p. 135]
A perennial argument with dictionary makers is whether they should be prescriptive (that is, whether they should prescribe how language should be used) or descriptive (that is, merely describe how it is used without taking a position). [...] The American Heritage Dictionary, first published in 1969, instituted a panel of distinguished commentators to rule on contentious points of usage, which are discussed, often at some length, in the text. But others have been more equivocal (or prudent or spineless depending on how you view it). The revised Random House Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1987, accepts the looser meanings of most words, though often noting that the newer usage is frowned on "by many" -- a curiously timid approach that acknowledges the existence of expert opinion and yet constantly places it at a distance. [...] It even accepts kudo as a singular -- prompting a reviewer from Time magazine to ask if one instance of pathos should now be a patho.
It's a fine issue. One of the undoubted virtues of English is that it is a fluid and democratic language in which meanings shift and change in response to the pressures of common usage rather than the dictates of committees. It is a natural process that has been going on for centuries. To interfere with that process is arguably both arrogant and futile, since clearly the weight of usage will push new meanings into currency no matter how many authorities hurl themselves into the path of change.
But at the same time, it seems to me, there is a case for resisting change -- at least slapdash change. [...] clarity is generally better served if we agree to observe a distinction between imply and infer, forego and forgo, fortuitous and fortunate, uninterested and disinterested, and many others. As John Ciardi observed, resistance may in the end prove futile, but at least it tests the changes and makes them prove their worth.
Perhaps for our last words on the subject of usage we should turn to the last words of the venerable French grammarian, Dominique Bonhours, who proved on his deathbed that a grammarians work is never done when he gazed at those gathered loyally around him and whispered: "I am about to -- or I am going to -- die; either expression is used."
[p. 136-137]
By virtue of their brevity, dictionary definitions often fail to convey the nuances of English. [...] A dictionary will tell you that tall and high mean much the same thing, but it won't explain to you that while you can apply either term to a building you can only apply tall to a person. On the strength of dictionary definitions alone a foreign visitor to your home could be excused for telling you that you have an abnormal child, that your wife's cooking is exceedingly odorous, and that your speech at a recent sales conference was laughable, and intend nothing but the warmest praise.
[p. 143]
Noah Webster (1758-1843) was by all accounts a severe, correct, humourless, religious, temperate man who was not easily liked, even by other severe, religious, temperate, humourless people. [...] He credited himself with coining many words, among them demoralize, appreciation, accompaniment, ascertainable, and expenditure, which in fact had been in the language for centuries. He was also inclined to boast of learning he simply did not possess. He claimed to have mastered twenty-three languages [...] Yet, as Thomas Pyles put it, he showed "an ignorance of German which would disgrace a freshman", and his grasp of other languages was equally tenuous. [...] Pyles calls [Webster's] Dissertation on the English Language "a fascinating farrago of the soundest linguistic common sense and the most egregious poppycock". It is hard to find anyone saying a good word about him.
[p. 147]
[...] This was the first of twelve volumes of the most masterly and ambitious philological exercise ever undertaken, eventually to be redubbed Oxford English Dictionary. The intention was to record every word used in English since 1150 and to trace it back through all its shifting meanings, spellings and uses to its earliest recorded appearance. There was to be at least once citation for each century of its existence and at least one for each slight change of meaning. To achieve this, almost every significant piece of English literature from the last seven and a half centuries would have to be not so much read as scoured.
The man chosen to guide this enterprise was James Augustus Henry Murray (1837-1915), a Scottish-born bank clerk, schoolteacher, and self-taught philologist. He was an unlikely, and apparently somewhat reluctant, choice to take on such a daunting task. Murray, in the best tradition of British eccentrics, had a flowing white beard and liked to be photographed in a long black housecoat with a mortarboard on his head. He had eleven children, all of whom were, almost from the moment they learned the alphabet, roped into the endless business of helping sift through and alphabetize the several million slips of paper on which were recorded every twitch and burble of the language over seven centuries.
The ambition of the project was so staggering that one can't help wondering if Murray really knew what he was taking on. In point of fact, it appears he didn't. He thought the whole business would take a dozen years and fill half a dozen volumes covering some 6,400 pages. In the event, the project took more than four decades and sprawled across 15,000 densely printed pages.
[p. 150-151]
In Hong Kong you can find a place called the Plastic Bacon Factory. In Naples, according to the Observer, there is a sports store called Snoopy's Dribbling, while in Brussels there is a men's clothing store called Big Nuts, where on my last visit to the city it had a sign saying: "Sweat - 690 Francs". (Close inspection revealed this to be a sweatshirt.) In Japan you can drink Homo Milk or Poccari Sweat (a popular soft drink), eat some chocolate called Hand-Maid Queer-Aid, or go out and buy some Arm Free Grand Slam Muns ingwear.
[...] In Yugoslavia they speak five languages. In not one of them does the [English] word stop exist, yet every stop sign in the country says just that.
I bring this up to make the somewhat obvious observation that English is the most global of languages. Products are deemed to be more exciting if they carry English messages even when, as so often happens, the messages don't make a lot of sense. I have before me a Japanese eraser which says: "Mr. Friendly Quality Eraser. Mr Friendly Arrived!! He always stay near you, and steals in your mind to lead you a good situation". On the bottom of the eraser is a further message: "We are ecologically minded. This package will self-destruct in Mother Earth". It is a product that was made in Japan solely for Japanese consumers, yet there is not a word of Japanese on it. Coke cans in Japan come with the slogan "I Feel Coke & Sound Special". A correspondent of the Economist spotted a T-shirt in Tokyo that said: "O.D. On Bourgeoisie Milk Boy Milk". A shopping bag carried a picture of dancing elephants above the legend: "Elephant Family Are Happy With Us. Their Humming Makes Us Feel Happy". [...] I recently saw in a London store a jacket with bold lettering that said: "Rodeo - 100% Boys For Atomic Atlas". The jacket was made in Britain. Who by? Who for?
[p. 173-174]
So how many people in the world speak English? [...] In the first place, it is not simply a matter of taking all the English-speaking countries in the world and adding up their populations. America alone has forty million people who don't speak English -- about the same as the number of people in England who do speak English.
Then there is the problem of deciding whether a person is speaking English or something that is like English but is really quite a separate language. This is especially true of the many English-based creoles in the world [...]
A second and rather harsher problem is whether a person speaks English or simply thinks he speaks it. I have before me a brochure from the Italian city of Urbino, which contains a dozen pages of the most gloriously baroque and impenetrable English prose, lavishly garnished with misspellings, unexpected hyphenations, and twisted grammar. A brief extract: "The integrity and thus the vitality of Urbino is no chance, but a conservation due to the factors constituted in all probability by the approximate framework of the unity of the country, the difficulty od [sic] communications, the very concentric pattern of hill sistems or the remoteness from hi-ghly developed areas, the force of the original design proposed in its construction, with the means at the disposal of the new sciences of the Renaissance, as an ideal city even". It goes on like that for a dozen pages. There is scarcely a sentence that makes even momentary sense. I daresay that if all the people in Italy who speak English were asked to put up their hands, this author's would be one of the first to fly up, but whether he can be said to speak English is, to put it charitably, moot.
[p. 174-175]
[...] we have a well-practiced gift for obfuscation in the English-speaking world. According to U.S. News & World Report [27 May 1988], an unnamed American airline referred in its annual report to an "involuntary conversion of a 727". It meant that it had crashed. At least one hospital, according to The Times, has taken to describing death as a "negative patient-care outcome". The Pentagon is peerless at this sort of thing. It once described toothpicks as "wooden interdental stimulators" and tents as "frame-supported tension structures". Here is an extract from the Pentagon's Department of Food Procurement specifications for a regulation Type 2 sandwich cookie: "The cookie shall consist of two round cakes with a layer of filling between them. The weight of the cookie shall be not less than 21.5 grams and filling weight not less than 6.4 grams. The base cakes shall be uniformly baked with a color ranging from not lighter than chip 27885 or darker than chip 13711 ... The color comparisons shall be made under north sky daylight with the objects held in such a way as to avoid specular refractance." And so it runs on for fifteen densely typed pages. Every single item the Pentagon buys is similarly detailed: plastic whistles (sixteen pages), olives (seventeen pages), hot chocolate (twenty pages).
[p. 184]
[...] Esperanto, devised in 1887 by a Pole named Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhoff, who lived in an area of Russia where four languages were commonly spoken. Zamenhoff spent years diligently concocting his language. Luckily he was a determined fellow because at an advanced stage in the work his father, fearing his son would be thought a spy working in code, threw all Ludovic's papers on the fire and the young Pole was forced to start again from scratch. Esperanto is considerably more polished and accessible than Volapük. It has just sixteen rules, no definite articles, no irregular endings, and no illogicalities of spelling. [...] Esperanto looks faintly like a cross between Spanish and Martian, as this brief extract, from the Book of Genesis, shows: "En la komenco, Dio kreis le cielon kaj la teron." Esperanto has one inescapable shortcoming. For all its eight million claimed speakers, it is not widely used.
[p. 185-186]
[...] Many British appellations are of truly heroic proportions, like that of the World War I admiral named Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Ernle-Drax. The best ones go in for a kind of gloriously silly redundancy towards the end, as with Sir Humphrey Dodington Benedict Sherston Sherston-Baker and the truly unbeatable Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraduati Tollemache-Tollemache-de Orellana-Plantagenet-Tollemache-Tollemache, a British army major who died in World War I. [...] Somewhere in Britain to this day there is a family rejoicing in the name MacGillesheatheanaich.
Often, presumably for reasons of private amusement, the British pronounce their names in ways that bear almost no relation to their spelling. Leveson-Gower is "loosen gore". Marjoribanks is "marchbanks", Hiscox is "hizzko", Howick is "hoyk", Ruthven is "rivven", Zuill is "yull", Menzies is "mingiss". They find a peculiar pleasure in taking old Norman names and mashing them around until they become something altogether unique, so the Beaulieu becomes "bewley", [...] Belvoir somehow becomes "beaver", and Beaudesert turns, unfathomably, into "belzer".
[...] I could go on and on. In fact, I think I will. Viscount Althorp pronounces his name "awltrop", while the rather more sensible people of Althorp, the Northamptonshire village next to the viscount's ancestral home, say "all-thorp". [...] The surname generally said to have the most pronunciations is Featherstonewaugh, which can be pronounced in any of five ways: "feather-stun-haw", "feerston-shaw", "feston-haw", "feeson-hay" or (for those in a hurry) "fan-shaw". But in fact there are two other names with five pronunciations: Coughtrey [...] and Wriotheseley, which can be "rottsly", "rittsly", "rizzli", "rithly", or "wriotheslee".
The problem is so extensive, and the possibility of gaffes so omnipresent, that the BBC employs an entire pronunciation unit, a small group of dedicated orthoepists (professional pronouncers) who spend their working lives getting to grips with these illogical pronunciations so that broadcasters don't have to do it on the air.
In short, there is scarcely an area of name giving in which the British don't show a kind of wayward genius. [...] Just in the City of London, an area of one square mile [...] you can find churches named St Giles Cripplegate, St Sepulchre Without Newgate, All Hallows Barking, and the practically unbeatable St Andrews-by-the-Wardrobe. But those are just their everyday names: often the full, official titles are even more breathtaking, as with The Lord Mayor's Parish Church of St Stephen Walbrook and St Swithin Londonstone, St Benet Sheerhogg and St Mary Bothall with St Laurence Pountney, which is, for all that, just one church.
Equally arresting are British pub names [...] Almost any name will do if it is at least faintly absurd, unconnected with the name of the owner, and entirely lacking in any suggestion of drinking, conversing, and enjoying oneself. At a minimum the name should puzzle foreigners -- this is a basic requirement of most British institutions -- and ideally it should excite long and inconclusive debate, defy all logical explanation, and evoke images that border on the surreal. Among the pubs that meet, and indeed exceed, these exacting standards are the Frog and Nightgown, the Bull and Spectacles, the Flying Monk, and the Crab and Gumboil.
[...] The picture is further clouded by the consideration that many pub names have been corrupted over the centuries. The Pig and Whistle is said to have its roots in peg (a drinking vessel) and wassail (a festive drink). [...] The Elephant and Castle, originally a pub and now a district of London, may have been the Infanta de Castille. The Old Bull and Bush, a famous pub on Hampstead Heath, is said to come from Boulogne Boughe and to commemorate a battle in France. Some of these derivations may be fanciful, but there is solid evidence to show that the Dog and Bacon was once the Dorking Beacon, that the Cat and Fiddle was once Caterine la Fidèle (at least it is recorded as such in the Domesday Book), and that the Ostrich Inn in Buckinghamshire began life as the Hospice Inn.
[p. 191-193,195]
[...] a little-known fact about Shakespeare is that his father moved to Stratford-upon-Avon from a nearby village shortly before his son's birth. Had he not done so, the Bard of Avon would instead be known as the rather less ringing Bard of Snitterfield.
[p. 200]
[...] what America does possess in abundance is a legacy of colourful names. A mere sampling: Chocolate Bayou, Dime Box, Ding Dong and Lick Skillet, Texas; ]...] Zzyzx Springs, California; Coldass Creek, Stiffknee Knob and Rabbit Shuffle, North Carolina; Bear Wallow, Mud Lick, Minnie Mousie, Eight-Eight, and Bug, Kentucky; Dull, Only, Peeled Chestnut, Defeated, and Nameless, Tennessee; [...] Why, Arizona; Dead Bastard Peak, Crazy Woman Creek, and the unsurpassable Maggie's Nipples, Wyoming.
[p. 204]
But the greatest outburst of prudery came in the nineteenth century when it swept through the world like a fever. It was an age when sensibilities grep so delicate that one lady was reported to have dressed her goldfish in miniature suits for the sake of propriety and a certain Madame de la Bresse left her fortune to provide clothing for the snowmen of Paris. [...]
[...] Rather more plausible is the anecdote recorded in [Words and Ways of American English by Thomas Pyles] in which [Frederick] Marryat made the serious gaffe of asking a young lady if she had hurt her leg in a fall. The woman blushingly averted her gaze and told him that people did not use that word in America. "I apologized for my want of refinement, which was attributable to having been accustomed only to English society," Marryat drolly remarked, and asked the lady what was the acceptable term for "such articles". Limbs, he was told.
[p. 216-217]

From Bill Bryson, Troublesome Words (3rd Edition, Penguin Books, 2002):

affect, effect. As a verb, affect means to influence ("Smoking may affect your health") or to adopt a pose or manner ("He affected ignorance"). Effect as a verb means to accomplish ("The prisoners effected an escape"). As a noun, the word needed is almost always effect (as in "personal effects" or "the damaging effects of war"). Affect as a noun has a narrow psychological meaning to do with emotional states (by way of which it is related to affection).
It is worth noting that affect as a verb is nearly always bland and almost meaningless. In "The winter weather affected profits in the building division" (The Times) and "The noise of the crowds affected his play" (Daily Telegraph), it is by no means clear whether the noise and weather helped or hindered or exacerbated the profits and play. A more precise word can almost always be found.
amid, among. Among applies to things that can be separated and counted, amid to things that cannot. Rescuers might search among survivors, but amid wreckage.
androgenous, androgynous. The first applies to the production of male offspring; the second means having both male and female characteristics.
appraise, apprise. "No decision is likely, he said, until they had been appraised of the damage" (Sunday Times). The word wanted here was apprise, which means to inform. Appraise means to assess or evaluate. An insurance assessor appraises damage and apprises owners.
artefact, artifact. The first spelling is generally preferred in Britain, the second in America, but either is correct. In either case, it is something shaped by human hand and not merely any very old object, as was apparently thought here: "The team found bones and other artefacts at the site" (Guardian). Bones are not artefacts. The word is related to artifice, artificial and artisan, all of which imply a human contribution.
auger, augur. "The results do not auger well for the President in the forthcoming mid-term elections" (Guardian). Wrong. Auger is not a verb, it is a drilling tool. To foretell or betoken, the sense intended in the example above, is to augur, with a "u". The two words are not related. In fact, until relatively recently times an auger was called a nauger.
between you and I. John Simon called this "a grammatical error of unsurpassable grossness". [...]
blatant, flagrant. The words are not quite synonymous. Something that is blatant is glaringly obvious and contrived ("a blatant lie") or wilfully obnoxious ("blatant engineering") or both. Something that is flagrant is shocking and reprehensible ("a flagrant miscarriage of justice"). If I tell you that I regularly travel to the moon, that is a blatant lie, not a flagrant one. If you set fire to my house, that is a flagrant act, not a blatant one.
coelacanth for the type of fish. Pronounced see-luh-kanth.
cognoscenti, meaning people who are especially well informed or of elevated taste, is plural. For a single well-informed person, the word is cognoscente.
comic, comical. "There was a comic side to the tragedy" (The Times). Something that is comic is intended to be funny. Something that is comical is funny whether or not that was the intention. Since tragedies are never intentionally amusing, the word wanted here was comical.
complement, compliment: The words come from the same Latin root, complere, meaning to fill up, but have long had separate meanings. Compliment means to praise. Complement has stayed closer to the original meaning: to fill out or make whole.
contagious, infectious: Diseases spread by contact are contagious. Those spread by air and water are infectious. Used figuratively ("contagious laughter", "infectious enthusiasm"), either is all right.
definite, definitive. Definite means precise and unmistakable. Definitive means final and conclusive. A definite offer is a clear one; a definitive offer is one that permits of no haggling.
demean. Some authorities, among them Fowler, object to the word in the sense of to debase or degrade, pointing out that its original, more neutral meaning signified only conduct or behaviour (a neutrality preserved in the cognate form demeanour). But, as Bernstein notes, the looser usage has been with us since 1601, which suggests that it may be just a bit late to try to hold the line now.
deplete, reduce. Though their meanings are roughly the same, deplete has the additional connotation of injurious reduction. As the Evanses note, a garrison may be reduced by administrative order, but depleted by sickness.
distrait, distraught. The first means abstracted in thought, absent-minded. The second means deeply agitated.
due to. Most authorities continue to accept that due is an adjective only and must always modify a noun. Thus "He was absent due to illness" would be wrong. We could correct it either by writing "He was absent because of [or owing to] illness" or by recasting the sentence in such a way as to give due a noun to modify, e.g., "His absence was due to illness".
The rule is mystifyingly inconsistent - no one has ever really explained why "owing to" used prepositionally is acceptable, while due to used prepositionally is not - but it should perhaps still be observed, at least in formal writing, if only to avoid a charge of ignorance.
effete. "Nor is it a concern only to the highly educated, or the effete Northeast, or to city folk" (Newman, A Civil Tongue). Effete does not mean affectedly intellectual or sophisticated, as was apparently meant here, or effeminate and weak, as it is more often used elsewhere. It means exhausted and barren. An effete poet is not necessarily intellectual or foppish, but rather someone whose creative impulses are spent.
embalmment. Note -mm-.
exception proves the rule, the. A widely misunderstood expression. As a moment's thought should confirm, it isn't possible for an exception to confirm a rule - but then that isn't the sense that was originally intended. Prove here is a "fossil" - that is a word or phrase that is now meaningless except within the confines of certain sayings ("hem and haw", "rank and file" and "to and fro" are other fossil expressions). Originally prove meant "test" (it comes from Latin probo, "I test"), so the exception proves the rule meant - and really still ought to mean - that the exception tests the rule. The original meaning of prove is preserved more clearly in two other expressions: "proving ground" and "the proof of the pudding is in the eating".
fulsome is one of the most frequently misapplied words in English. The sense that is usually accorded it - of being abundant or unstinting - is almost the opposite of the word's dictionary meaning. Fulsome is related to foul and means odorous or overfull, offensively insincere. "Fulsome praise", properly used, isn't a lavish tribute; it is unctuous and insincere toadying.
gild the lily. The passage from Shakespeare's King John is: "To gild refined gold, to paint the lily ... / Is wasteful and ridiculous excess." Thus it is both wrong and resorting to a woeful cliché to speak of "gilding the lily" in the sense of overdoing something.
grisly, gristly, grizzly. Occasionally and variously confused. The first means horrifying or gruesome. The second applies to meat that is full of gristle. The third means grey, especially grey-haired, and is a cliché when applied to old men.
guttural. Not -er-.
hamlet. "Police searched his house in the tiny hamlet of Oechtringen ..." (Observer). It is in the nature of hamlets to be tiny.
head over heels is not just a cliché; it is also, when you think about it, a faintly absurd one. Our heads are usually over our heels.
Hindi, Hindu, Hinduism, Hindustani. Hindi is the main language of India and Hindustani its main dialect. Hinduism is the main religious and social system of India. Hindu describes a follower of Hinduism.
hitherto. "In 1962, the regime took the hitherto unthinkable step of appropriating land" (Daily Telegraph). The writer meant "thitherto" ("until then"), but "theretofore" would have been better and "previously" better still.
Hobson's choice is sometimes taken to mean a dilemma or difficult decision, but in fact means no choice at all. It derives from a sixteenth-century Cambridge stable-keeper named Thomas Hobson, who hired out horses on a strict rotation. The customer was allowed to take the one nearest the stable door or none at all.
hopefully. "To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive". Fifty years ago that sentence by Robert Louis Stevenson would have suggested only one interpretation: that it is better to travel filled with hope than to actually reach your destination. Today, however, it could also be read as meaning: "To travel is, I hope, better than arriving".
ileum, ilium. The ileum is part of the small intestine; the ilium is part of the pelvis. Ilium (capital I) is also the Latin name for Troy.
inculcate means to persistently impress a habit upon or belief into another person. You inculcate an idea, not a person. "My father inculcated me with a belief in democracy" should be "My father inculcated in me a belief in democracy".
indict, indite. Very occasionally confused, as here: "... The American Family Association persuaded the city council to indite the museum director and his board for obscenity" (Independent). To lay a formal charge, the sense intended here, is to indict. Indite, a word rare almost to the point of obsolescence, means to set down in writing.
injurious - ious
jargon. At a conference of American sociologists in 1977, "love" was defined as "the cognitive-affective state characterised by intrusive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance". [...]
just deserts, not desserts. The expression has nothing to do with the sweet course after dinner. It comes from the French for "deserve", which may help you to remember that it has just one middle "s".
kith and kin. Your kin are your relatives. Your kith are your relatives and your acquaintances. Individually the words are antiquated. Together they are hackneyed.
languid, limpid. Not to be confused. Limpid means clear, calm, untroubled ("a limpid stream"). It has nothing to do with being limp or listless- meanings that are covered by languid.

lay, lie. "Laying on his back, Dalton used a long exposure of two seconds so as to achieve maximum depth of field" (Photography magazine). Unless Dalton was producing eggs, he was lying on his back. Lay and lie, in all their manifestations, are a constant source of errors. There are no simple rules for dealing with them. You must either commit their various forms to memory or avoid them altogether. The forms are:

	lay	lie
Present:	I lay the book on the table.	I lie down; I am lying down.
Past:	Yesterday I laid the book on the table.	Last night I lay down to sleep.
Present perfect:	I have already laid the book on the table.	I have lain in bed all day.

The most common type of error is to say: "If you're not feeling well, go upstairs and lay down". It should be "lie down".

loath, loathe. The first is an ajective that means reluctant, the second is a verb that means to despise.
majority, like major, has been wearied by overuse, particularly in the expression "the vast majority of" [...] "the vast majority of" seldom says more in four words than "most" says in one.
Majority should be reserved for describing the larger of two clearly divisible things, as in "A majority of members voted for the resolution". But even then a more specific description is usually better: "52 per cent", "almost two thirds", "more than 70 per cent", etc. When there is no sense of a clear contrast with a minority (as in "The majority of his spare time was spent reading"), majority is always better avoided.
manner born, to the. Not manor. The expression is from Hamlet.
millepede. Not milli-.
minuscule. Frequently misspelled, as here: "It was a market which was miniscule only file years ago" (Guardian). Think of minus, not mini.
misogamist, misogynist. The first hates marriage, the second hates women.
misspell. If there is one word that you don't wish in print to misspell, it is this one. Note -ss-.
mucous, mucus. The first is the adjectival form, the second the noun form. Thus mucus is the substance secreted by the mucous membranes.
naught, nought. The first means "nothing", as in "his efforts came to naught". The second is the figure zero. The game is noughts and crosses (known in the U.S. as tick-tack-toe).
neat's-foot oil, a substance used to treat leather, is a term that seldom appears these days, but is almost always misspelled in one way or another when it does appear.
new. "New chairman named at Weir Group" (Financial Times); "Medical briefing: the first in an occasional series on new developments in the sciences" (Times headline); "The search for new breakthroughs semms to have spurred extra spending in recent years" (Newsweek). Far more often than not in journalism, new is superfluous. The Weir Group would hardly be appointing an old chairman, not scientists searching for old breakthroughs, nor The Times, let us hope, running a series on old developments in the sciences. In each case [the word new] could be deleted without loss.
The rare double from The New York Times shows at a glance just how vacuous the word often is: "New Boom for Florida Causes New Concerns".
niceish is the spelling for something that is rather nice.
one. "The makers claim that one in 14 people in the world are following the exploits of this new hero" (Sunday Times). In such contructions one should be singular. In effect the sentence is saying: "Out of every 14 people in the world, one is following the exploits of this new hero". A slightly tricker case appears here: "An estimated one in three householders who are entitled to rebates are not claiming" (The Times). The first are is correct, but the second is wrong. Again, it may help to invert the sentence: "Of those householders who are entitled to rate rebates, one in every three is not claiming."
peruse. "Those of us who have been idly perusing the latest flock of holiday brochures ..." (Guardian). It is a losing battle no doubt, but perhaps worth pointing out that peruse does not mean to look over casually. It means to read or examine carefully.
prepositions. Anyone who believes that it is wrong to end a sentence with a preposition [...] is about a century out of touch. The "rule" was enshrined by one Robert Lowth, an eighteenth-century Bishop of London and gentleman grammarian. In his wildly idiosyncratic but curiously influential Short Introduction to English Grammar, Lowth urged his readers not to end sentences with a preposition if they could decently avoid it. Too many people took him much too literally and for a century and a half the notion held sway. Today, happily, it is universally condemned as a pointless affectation. Indeed, there are many sentences where the preposition could scarcely come anywhere but at the end: "This bed hasn't been slept in"; "What is the world coming to?"; "I don't know what you're talking about."
On a separate matter, a common fault among hurried or disorganised writers is to let prepositions pile up one after the other, as if the sentence were on some kind of automatic pilot. Consider this exceptional offering from The Times and note the abundance of ofs and afters: "Bettaney ... became the first member of the Security Service ever to be convicted of spying at the end of a trial held in camera after the first 35 minutes of the prosecution's opening to the return of the jury after a five-hour deliberation yesterday". The sentence is effectively indecipherable.
prescribe, proscribe. Prescribe means to set down as a rule or a guide. Proscribe means to denounce or prohibit. If you get bronchitis, your doctor may prescribe antibiotics and proscribe smoking.
presumptive, presumptuous. [...] Presumptuous means impudent and inclined to take liberties, or to act in a manner that is excessively bold and forthright. Presumptive means giving grounds to presume and is primarily a technical term. The wrong use is seen here: "She considered the question with the equanimity of someone who has long been immune to presumptive prying" (Sunday Telegraph).
prevaricate, procrastinate. [...] Prevaricate means to speak or act evasively, to stray from the truth. Procrastinate means to put off doing.
reiterate. [...] A common fault is seen here: "She hopes her message to the markets, reiterated again at the weekend, will be enough to prevent the pound sliding further" (The Times). "Again" is always superfluous with re- words (reiterate, repeat, reaffirm) and should be deleted.
remunerate. "Metathesis" is the term for transposing sounds or letters, which is what often happens with this word, as here: "Mr Strage said in the witness box that he was to receive fair renumeration for his work" (Independent). [...] Remunerate comes from the Latin munus (by which it is related to munificent). "Numeral", "enumerate" and other related words come from the Latin numerus.
restaurateur. [...] there is no "n" in restaurateur.
revert back is commonly seen and always redundant: "If no other claimant can be found, the right to the money will revert back to her" (Daily Telegraph). Delete back.
special, especial. The first means for a particular purpose, the second to a high degree. A special meal may be especially delicious.
split infinitives. [...] the belief that the split infinitive is a grammatical error. It is not. If it is an error at all, it is a rhetorical fault - a question of style - and not a grammatical one. [...] Almost no authority flatly condemns [the split infinitive]. No one would argue that a split inifinitive is a thing of beauty, but it is certainly no worse than some of the excruciating constructions foisted on readers by those who regard it with an almost pathological dread. Consider these three sentences, all from The Times, and all with a certain ring of desperation about them: "The agreement is unlikely significantly to increase the average price"; "It was a nasty snub for the Stock Exchange and caused it radically to rethink its ideas"; "The education system had failed adequately to meet the needs of industry and commercce, he said". [...] Literally the [last] sentence is telling us that the education system had set out to fail and had done so adequately. Sometimes, indeed, it is all but impossible not to split the infinitive and preserve any sense. Bernstein cites these constructions, all crying out to be left alone: "to more than double", "to at least maintain", "to all but ensure".
[...] Even Partridge, normally the most conservative of arbiters [...] says: "Avoid the split infinitive wherever possible; but if it is the clearest and most natural construction, use it boldly. The angels are on our side".
stalemate. "Senators Back Rise in Proposed Oil Tax as Stalemate Ends" (New York Times headline). Stalemates don't end. A chess match that reaches a stalemate is not awaiting a more decisive outcome; the stalemate is the outcome. "Standoff", the word the writer probably had in mind, or "deadlock" would have been much better choices here.
stationary, stationery. The difference in spelling goes back centuries, though etymologically there isn't any basis for it. Both words come from the Latin stationarius and both originally meant "standing in a fixed position". Stationers were tradesmen, usually booksellers, who sold their wares from a fixed spot (as opposed to itinerants). Today in Britain stationery is still sold by stationers, which makes the misspelling here less excusable. [...]
time. Often used superfluously in constructions of this sort: "The report will be available in two weeks' time" (Guardian). Time adds nothing to the sentence but length, and its deletion would obviate the need for an apostrophe after "weeks".
time, at this moment in. Unless you are striving for an air of linguistic ineptitude, never use this expression. Say "now".
transpire. "But Mayor Koch had a different version of what transpired" (The New York Times). Transpire does not mean occur, as was intended above. Still less does it mean arrive or be received, as was intended here: "And generally the group found it had too many stocks for the orders that transpired" (The Times). It means to leak out (literally in Latin "to breathe through") and is best reserved for that sense.
try and is colloquial and better avoided in serious writing. "The Monopolies Commission will look closely at retailing mergers to try and prevent lessening of competition" (Sunday Times). Make it "try to prevent".
tumult, turmoil. Both describe confusion and agitiation. The difference is that tumult applies only to people, but turmoil applies to both people and things. Tumultuous, however, can also describe things as well as people (tumultuous applause, tumultuous seas).
turgid, turbid. It is seldom possible to tell with certainty whether a writer is using turgid in its proper sense or is confusing it with turbid, but confusion would seem to be the case here: "She insisted on reading the entire turgid work aloud, a dusk-to-dawn affair that would have tried anyone's patience" (Sunday Times). Turgid means inflated, grandiloquent, bombastic. It does not mean muddy or impenetrable, which meanings are covered by turbid.
venal, venial. Venial, from the Latin venialis ("forgiveable"), means excusable; a venial sin is a minor one. Venal means corruptible. It comes from the Latin venalis ("for sale") and describes someone who is capable of being bought.
venerate, worship. Although in figurative senses the words are interchangeable, in religious contexts worship should apply only to God. Roman Catholics, for instance, worship God but venerate saints.
via, meaning "by way of", indicates the direction of a journey and not the means by which the journey is achieved. It is correct to say, "We flew from London to Sydney via Singapore" but not "We travelled to the islands via seaplane".
viable. [...] does not mean feasible or workable or promising, senses in which it is frequently used. It means capable of independent existence, and its use really ought to be confined to that meaning. Even when it is correctly used, it tends to make the sentence read like a government document, as here: "Doing nothing threatens the viability of the lakes and woodlands of the northeastern states" (Chicago Tribune). Deleting "the viability of" would shorten the sentence without altering its sense.
vitreous, vitriform. The first describes something made, or having the quality, of glass. The second means to have the appearance of glass.
whence. "And man will return to the state of hydrogen from whence he came" (Sunday Telegraph). Although there is ample precedence for from whence - the King James Bible has the sentence "I will lift up my eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help" - it is none the less tautological. Whence means "from where". It is enough to say "the state of hydrogen whence he came".
who, whom. For those who are perennially baffled by the distinction between these two relative pronouns, it may come as some comfort to know that Shakespeare, Addison, Ben Jonson, Dickens, Churchill and the translators of the King James Bible have equally been flummoxed in their time.
The rule can be stated simply. Whom is used when it is the object of a preposition ("To whom it may concern") or verb ("The man whom we saw last night") or the subject of a complementary infinitive ("The person whom we took to be your father"). Who is used on all other occasions.
Consider now three extracts in which the wrong choice has been made: "Mrs Hinckley said that her some had been upset by the murder of Mr Lennon, who he idolized" (The New York Times); "Colombo, whom law enforcement officials have said is the head of a Mafia family in Brooklyn ..." (The New York Times); " Heart-breaking decision - who to save" (Times headline). We can check the correctness of such sentences by imagining them as he/him constructions. For instance, would you say that "Hinckley idolized he" or "idolized him"? Would the law enforcement officers say that "he is the head of a Mafia family" or "him is the head"? And is it a heart-breaking decision over whether to save he or to save him?
Simple, isn't it? Well, not quite. When the relative pronoun follows a preposition in a relative clause, the simple test falls to pieces. Consider this sentence from Fortune magazine: "They rent it to whomever needs it". Since we know that you say "for whom the bell tollls" and "to whom it may concern", it should follow that we would say "to whomever needs it". If we test that conclusion by imagining the sentence as a he/him construction - would they "rent it to he" or "rent it to him"? - we are bound to plump for whom. But we would be wrong. The difficulty is that the relative pronoun is the subject of the verb "needs" and the object of the preposition "to". The sentence is in effect saying "They rent it to any person who needs it."
Similarly, whomever would be wrong in these two sentences: "We must offer it to whoever applies first"; "Give it to whoever wants it". Again, in effect they are saying: "We must offer it to the person who applies first" and Give it to the person who wants it".
Such constructions usually involve a choice between whoever and whomever (as opposed to a simple who and whom), which should always alert you to process with caution, but they need not. An exceptions - and a rather tricky one - is seen here: "The disputants differed diametrically as to who they thought might turn out to be the violator" (cited by Bernstein). The sentence is saying: "The disputants differed diametrically as to the identity of the person who, they thought, might turn out to be the violator."
Most sentences, it must be said, are much more straightforward thatn this, and by performing a little verbal gymnastics it is usually possible to decide with some confidence which case to use. But is it worth the bother? Bernstein, in his later years, thought not. In 1975 he wrote to twenty-five authorities on usage asking if they thought there was any real point in preserving whom except when it directly governed by a preposition (as in "to whom it may concern"). Six voted to preserve whom, four were undecided and fifteen thought it should be abandoned.
English has been shedding its pronoun declensions for hundreds of years; today who is the only relative pronoun that is still declinable. Preserving the distinction between who and whom does nothing to promote clarity or reduce ambiguity. It has become merely a source of frequent errors and perpetual uncertainty. Authorities have been tossing stones at whom for at least 200 years - Noah Webster was one of the first to call it needless - but the word refuses to go away. A century from now it may be a relic, but for the moment you ignore it at the risk of being thought unrefined. And there is, in my view, a certain elegance in seeing a tricky whom properly appliced. I, for one, would not like to see it go.
whose. Two small problems here. One is the persistent belief that whose can apply only to people. The authorities are unanimous that there is nothing wrong with saying, "The book, a picaresque novel whose central characters are ..." rather than the clumsier "a picaresque novel the central characters of which are ...".
The second problem arises from a failure to discriminate between defining and non-defining clauses [...]. Consider: "Many parents, whose children ride motorbikes, live in constant fear of an accident" (Observer). By making the subordinate clause parenthetical (i.e. setting it off with commas) the writer is saying in effect: "Many parents live in fear of an accident and by the way their children ride motorbikes". The writer meant, of course, that the parents live in fear because their children ride motorbikes; that notion is not incidental to the full thought. Thus the clause is defining and the commas should be removed. Gowers cites this example from a wartime training manual: "Pilots, whose minds are dull, do not usually live long". Removing the commads would convert an insult into sound advice. [...]

	This page last changed: 1 Aug 2005
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heard	- beard
road	- broad
five	- give
early	- dearly
beau	- beauty
steak	- streak
ache	- moustache
low	- how
doll	- droll
scour	- four
grieve	- sieve
paid	- said
break	- speak