TN Read-Along #4 Discussion Thread: Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words
A very informative read, if somewhat discouraging (nearly every page contains a word or phrase I’ve misused for years), and if I had it to do again, I wouldn’t read it straight through; the book’s tone, cumulatively, is just a bit snotty.
Bryson’s entry on “lead, led” is one example:
Confusion between the two is astonishingly — and really inexcusably — common, as here: “The programme in Tissue Engineering will be lead by Professor Tim Hardingham, Manchester and Professor David Williams, Liverpool” (New Scientist advertisement). The past-tense spelling of the verb lead is led. It is also worth mentioning in passing that “Manchester” in the example should have a comma after it as well as before. (119)
I might mention — skipping the disingenuous “in passing” — that 1) it’s an ad in a science publication, which is the easiest of prey; 2) piling on with the dropped comma feels deliberate; and 3) that writers of all stripes frequently confuse “lead” and “led” is not all that astonishing, given that the past tense of “read,” which rhymes with this definition of “lead,” is spelled “read” — and that there is another definition of “lead” that rhymes with “led.”
Yes, the error is common. Yes, the author of the ad should have taken the time to proofread it. No, as errors go, it’s not all that difficult to understand — or to excuse in its inception. Calm down.
The high-handed dismissal of “’til” is even harder to swallow:
until, till, ’til, ’till. The first two are legitimate and interchangeable. The second two are wrong and, indeed, illiterate. (205)
I failed to bring my language reference shelf with me on vacation, but: asshole says what? “Until,” fine, obviously, and I’ve never even seen “till” with an apostrophe ahead of it, so I’ll co-sign that. But I distinctly recall discussing “till” vs. “’til” with Wing, trying to decide which should prevail in TWoP recaps, because I used the former, which she insisted isn’t correct for formal writing; I switched, I believe because I looked it up and my sources sided with her.
I have no issue with “till,” because I used it for years, but deeming what looks to me like a perfectly valid contraction of “until” “illiterate” is uncalled for.(As is the entry on “unless and until.” Bryson sniffs, “One or the other, please,” but the two words don’t mean the same thing. “If” can include “when,” too, in a way, but until it means the same thing, I’m not pitching “if and when” overboard either. I agree with most of his objections to redundant phrasings, but this one doesn’t qualify.)
I may have learned that “meticulous” is meant for pejorative use, that “dilemma” is for contexts that contain only two choices, and that a “replica” is an exact copy to scale and not a model or a miniature, but now I want to continue using them incorrectly out of sheer spite.
I’d also add, after years of struggling against myself, in vain — and in error — that it’s time to let the “nauseous” thing go. The usage as a synonym for “nauseated” predates “nauseated” itself, and the word sounds more like what it’s taken to mean than the suggested substitution. I’ll get behind you on “noisome,” but the “nauseous” ship has sailed.
Tags: Bill Bryson books our friend English The TN Read-Along
Bryson can be slightly too much, at times. I generally like his travel books, but every time he gets into an unnecessary argument with a fast-food worker, or blames his difficulties on anything other than the massive hangover he’s sporting three mornings out of five, I just want to shake him. Shut up, Bill.
So essentially he’s overly prescriptionist instead of descriptionist? I am an English teacher and there are things that bug me all the time (Hopefully vs. I hope, for example) but I feel like it’s too hard to fight that battle when I have kids who say “They disappeared him” or “I axed him about the homework, but he didn’t answer.”
I’m not reading along, but I’m sad to know that Bill Bryson could ever be snotty, because I fell in love with him on the strength of “A Short History of Nearly Everything.”
I’m up to pease pudding, and still muddling through. It’s an interesting book but not one you can really blitz through like a novel.
I love Bryson, he’s one of my favorite authors, but I do agree that he can start to leak some condesending fumes after a while. I remember being pretty incensed during one exchange in In A Sunburned Country, when he’s ordering breakfast at McDonalds and the counter jockey asks if he wants an apple pie. It’s clearly a special that the order takers have to mention to every customer (and the kid says as much), but Bryson really gets pretty nasty, asking if the kid recalls his original order, and “may I have it this morning or shall we talk some more?”
People of the world who are ordering food, listen up. If someone who’s taking your order asks if you want apple pie, two fish sandwiches for the price of one, and extra pizza topping or whatever, it’s because their boss told them to. And yes, they are listening. And yes, the nineteen year old you just sharpened your claws on will get in trouble if they don’t ask if you want XYZ. Just listen politely and say no thank you. Then you can both move on and no one is an asshole. Thanking you so much.
Anyhoodle, back to the book–I was quite pleased to see the definition of Hobson’s Choice, one of those phrases I assumed I knew and never looked up. Turns out I was right!
I totally agree on the tone. I think that’s what I liked so much about Fowler’s – his tone is pretty caustic at times, but to me it manages to hit “endearingly curmudgeon-y” rather than “supercilious and smug.”
And the dilemma thing makes sense in terms of the linguistic root, but what the hell do you say when there’s a dilemma-type situation with more than two choices? (Although I’m pleased to note that the Pride & Prejudice quote
Ack, now I’m late for work.
Dammit! I was totally sure “dilemma” was in that P&P quote. Sadly, no:
But anyway, you can see how it sprang to mind.
But…but…I love him!
Heh! I absolutely love Bill Bryson and I find his ability to become mortally offended by some of the errors he mentions quite hilariously (possibly unintentionally), so I can forgive him his snottiness: I really love this book. The one problem is that so many of errors he mentions (particularly the misuse of common words and phrases) are ubiquitious and it’s actually quite annoying to realise how wrong they are: you tend to start noticing them everywhere.
I had always hated ’till’ as an alternative of ‘until’, but I don’t agree with Bryson that it’s wrong/illiterate. And for casual communication I have no problem with ’til.
To prevent myself looking like a total Bryson fan girl (although I do love his writing), I spotted a fair few redundant and repetitive phrases in his latest book, ‘At Home’. Nobody is perfect, it seems.
I love Bill Bryson but he does sometimes get snotty. Maybe all grammar pedants are a bit prone to that though? (Me included!)
I use “unless or until” all the time. eg “I will not be able to perform action X unless or until I am sent material Y.”
What’s wrong with “noisome” though? It’s in Shakespeare!
Noisome weeds which without profit suck the soil’s fertility from wholesome flowers. – Richard II, 3. 4
Of noisome, musty chaff: He said, ’twas folly, For one poor grain or two, to leave unburnt, And still to nose the offence. – King Henry VIII
foul breath is noisome ; therefore I will depart unkissed – Measure for Measure
Nothing’s “wrong” with noisome; people tend to use it to mean “noisy,” which is not what it means, and I’m fine with holding the line on that one. “Nauseous” as a synonym for “nauseated,” however, is not incorrect.
I don’t have Garner with me (and I have yet to do a fine-tooth-comb review of the new edition), but he doesn’t get that tone. He’s frequently brusque, but businesslike, not fed up with my stupidity, which is a key distinction.
I didn’t hate the book and don’t hate Bryson — the lone entry for Z is very funny. But as I said, taken all together, after pages and pages of curt corrections to spellings of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge…the impatience began to wear. And a number of the references just felt like showing off.
I’m still back here in the F’s , but I ‘ve detected some themes.
First, I’m surprised that the prescriptionists among us are satisfied by the work in any sense at all. He seems quite mealy-mouthed at times. It seems to me that the book will annoy prescriptionists and descriptionists equally.
Second, he certainly worships at the altar of parsimony, doesn’t he? Apparently, any sort of redundancy is to be eliminated because brevity is always better. To me the point of prose is clarity, and redundancy does not impair clarity. In fact, given that all readers’ attention can flag, some redundancy is good. Further, I think that a non-trivial amount of sense is borne by the rhythm and cadence of words even in written material which will never be spoken aloud. The obsessive and mindless elimination of redundant words advocated throughout the book can interfere with the natural and effective scansion of any prose which would follow Bryson’s dictates.
Third, all the spelling entries should be eliminated. There’s some mild interest when various forms of a word have different spellings, but in the age of spell-checkers the entries are pointless, and the ones selected serve merely to betray Bryson’s fixations.
I totally agree with the ‘just felt like showing off’ call, Sars: some words and phrases he mentions are so obscure that I can’t really believe that he stumbles across them being misused on a regular basis.
I do appreciate his corrective spellings for words like perceptible (not able). I have a terrible time with things like that–I can see it’s spelled wrong but can’t get it to look right, so this is a handy guide.
Also, when did “At Home” come out? I sense an addition to the book pile…
@Mert: Exactly, on all counts.
To be fair, he did write the orginal edition while he was a journalist, and brevity does tend to be the soul of clarity in a newspaper/magazine article. I would say the challenge is to write a memorable line without recourse to the wanderings a novel might provide.
I would say his strictures would keep fiction on a short and strangling leash, but it’s not necessarily a bad prescription for a newspaper article, especially for writing headlines–a skill in itself.
Reading this book kind of made me understand where people come from when they say “it’s just language, man, language like evolves and stuff, man, and you understood me anyway, why get so upset when I say ‘breath’ when I mean ‘breathe’ or ‘your’ when I mean ‘you’re’?”
Thing is, though…there’s “wrong in an obscure and interpretation-dependent way that may have been a stylistic choice”, and then there’s “flat damn wrong“. Dropping articles to imitate a conversational tone is the former. Confusing “effect” and “affect” is the latter.
@Mert:
I don’t see a problem with eliminating redundant words. Confusing verbosity for erudition is a hallmark of the unsophisticated writer.
I suggest that what Bryson’s arguing about is the inappropriate use of redundancy as an intensifier; similiar to misusing “literally”.
Honest question here: I was familiar with the terms as “prescriptivist” and “descriptivist” (cf. prescriptive and descriptive linguistics), but a few people above (and elsewhere, I’ve seen) have mentioned “prescriptionist” and “descriptionist.” Is one pair or the other correct, or are both acceptable?
…And does Bryson have anything smarmy to say about it? Hee.
@Grainger
I do not have a problem elimating redundant words either: as a stylistic choice it’s fine. However, Bryson seems to base many of his entries on the idea that fewer words is always better. And that is simply not true.
We’d probably all agree (Bryson included) that redundancy should be intentional and conscious rather than habitual and unthinking, and so there is some merit in bringing commonly redundant formulations to people’s attention as in this dictionary. Nevertheless, Bryson’s tone around the issue is much more rote and formulaic. He’s a dog worrying at a bone.
Just to throw it out there, AP says “till or until. But not ’til.” So that’s probably what you’re going to see in news publications.
I was shocked to find, about halfway through the book, that I was frequently responding to entries with an exasperated mental “who the hell cares?” Because usually, I care, a lot.
I also frequently found myself thinking, “Sez you!” While many of the entries were simply spelling notes or comparisons of dictionary definitions, others seemed to be matters of preference. For example, I don’t agree that “put an end to” carries the same rhetorical sense as “stop” or “finish”, or that “finalize” can always adequately be replaced with “finish, complete, [or] conclude”.
Still an interesting read … I learned many trivia :)
I once used “nauseous” in an essay in a college-level creative writing class. The instructor took 10 points off for the “error,” which I felt was excessive and unjust.
Because of that incident, the two words (and their supposed distinctions) have stuck in my mind all these years. I now work as a medical transcriptionist, and for the last ~10 years, every time a doctor dictates that “the medicine made her nauseous” or whatever, I’ve changed it to “nauseated.” I wonder if I’ll be able to stop doing that now – and I wonder if that instructor is still at the same campus so I could send her a little note…
JenaK, I agree with you about the whole “personal choice” thing–for instance, “pay” has an entirely different ring to it in my ear than “pay off”. I pay a bill when I send in my check, I pay a tab in a restaurant, I pay for a new shirt. I pay off an outstanding debt or a large, tattooed man named “Snake.” Bryson feels the “off” is redundant, but I don’t. Though he does have a point with examples like “The snow did little to slow down the British advance”–in that instance, especially in a report or nonfiction account, “slow the British advance” sounds snappier, more determined, and tenser.
I’m not reading along with this one…I do like Bryson but I tend to not trust his language-based books, after reading Mother Tongue, where he included a whole slew of wrongness about Australia’s linguistic habits [we don’t, in fact, call biscuits cookies outside of US-origin fast-food restaurants; aside from the deliberately-chosen political name of Labor, we don’t miss out the u; and yes we do call our currency the dollar but only because we could hardly keep calling it the pound after we went metric – it’s not an Americanism in the strict sense that he is claiming]. After that section (and the reapeating of the Eskimo snow myth as fact), I could not know what was true and what was false and therefore it might have been fun to be read, but it certainly wasn’t trustworthy. I don’t think I could trust this one, either.
I have to say I don’t necessarily mind the tone. He takes it a bit far, but I think it is sort of built into these kinds of discussions. I’m not a professional writer or editor, so I either want a specific answer to a usage question or I want to kill time with my coworkers and we’ve already covered Mad Men, Top Chef, and Project Runway. We tend to stake out positions and argue, with arrogance and without any actual expertise on the topic. I guess that builds up tolerance to Bryson’s tone. I bought the kindle edition for the book club and love having it as a handy electronic reference — way better than google.
@Wendy: my thoughts exactly!
In re: “nauseous” vs. “nauseated” [two words I haven’t yet properly learned to distinguish]: Garner says that “nauseous” being used in place of “nauseated” is “Stage 4: Ubiquitous but …” meaning that HE wouldn’t do it. Therefore I wouldn’t either.
I am the company Grammar Doyenne and Arbiter of All Matters Spelling and Punctuation — not that anyone cares or pays attention when I make corrections — but you wouldn’t believe the arguments I get from the semi-literates with whom I work who insist that “language DOES change and should be allowed to — so if I make a mistake, it’s because everyone else does it!” [I don’t do the “lemming off a cliff” thing that mothers do, although I’d like to …] So when Grainger said:
I rejoiced! THANK YOU, Grainger — it’s nice to know I’m not the only one sticking up for the English language.