Grammar & Language Usage. Language Arts. Reference. Nonfiction. HTML:One of the English language�??s most skilled and beloved writers guides us all toward precise, mistake-free grammar.
As usual Bill Bryson says it best: �??English is a dazzlingly idiosyncratic tongue, full of quirks and irregularities that often seem willfully at odds with logic and common sense. This is a language where �??cleave�?? can mean to cut in half or to hold two halves together; where the simple word �??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 are moving swiftly, but if you are stuck fast you are not moving at all; [and] where �??colonel,�?? �??freight,�?? �??once,�?? and �??ache�?? are strikingly at odds with 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 avoiding the traps and snares in English, and so he brashly suggested to a publisher that he should write one. Surprisingly, the proposition was accepted, and for �??a sum of money carefully gauged not to cause embarrassment or feelings of overworth,�?� he proceeded to write that book�??his first, inaugurating his stellar career.
Now, a decade and a half later, revised, updated, and thoroughly (but not overly) Americanized, it has become Bryson�??s Dictionary of Troublesome Words, more than ever an essential guide to the wonderfully disordered thing that is the English language. With some one thousand entries, from �??a, an�?� to �??zoom,�?� that feature real-world examples of questionable usage from an international array of publications, and with a helpful glossary and guide to pronunciation, this precise, prescriptive, and�??because it is written by Bill Bryson�??often witty book belongs on the desk of every pers