Overview

From the INTRODUCTION. This book explains the meaning and use of a thousand or more every-day words and expressions which are frequently misused or misunderstood. It is intended to give exactly the information most often wanted, and to present it in compact, accessible form, without pedantry, formality, or technicality. It is intended to save the person who wants to know from the labor of searching through dictionaries, grammars, and rhetorics (or of searching for them, if he does not have them at hand) and of piecing together for himself (if he can find it) the information he wants on a given word or phrase. Such a volume should be like beauty in one respect at least, in that it is its own excuse for being. That the public is interested in such matters as are discussed in these pages is an axiom to those who know the daily grist of questions on correct English usage that comes to the copy-reader, the proof-reader, the professor, the editor, from persons of all sorts who have the praise-worthy desire to use and not to abuse the English language. With such questions I have had intimate experience for a number of years - a number that seems large when I confess it, but still too small for a respectable boast. I dealt with many of them in a volume published not long ago, A Guide to Good English, and not the least of my reasons for considering the book successful is the fact that questions continue to come to me - indeed, one could answer them till doomsday without exhausting the list. In them this book takes its origin; its foundation lies in a wider and deeper experience, that of English-speaking people in using words for the last ten centuries, as exhibited in the invaluable collection of examples arranged in the Oxford Dictionary. It is on experience, then, that I have tried in every case to base my judgment; not on hearsay, theory, or tradition. The principle would seem to be an obvious one; doubtless every one of my predecessors in the field - and they are many - has set himself to follow it. But no one who examines many such books with care can avoid seeing the tendency of them to perpetuate errors, personal controversies and whims, and a traditional list of words and phrases, into which experience never guided them. One, for example, solemnly objects to the word cultured on the ground that there is no verb to culture, and a troop of others follow him like a flock of sheep. If any one of them had consulted his speaking knowledge of the language, he might have seen that the suffixed is often added to a noun to mean provided with - stilted does not imply a verb to stilt, and when we say that Paul Revere was booted and spurred, we mean that he was ready to ride, and not that he was kicked and pricked. Another invents a word which to him expresses the quality of Emerson's essays, and, under cover of discussing the word, barks at Emerson's heels through some four pages of fine print, a process which injures Emerson no more than it enlightens the public on the use of English words....

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