Ambrose Bierce's Write It Right

by Jan Freeman

In 1893, Ambrose Bierce declared "I am for preserving the ancient, primitive distinction between right and wrong." In Write it Right, originally published in 1909, Bierce turned this considerable zeal on the English language. The result revealed that the satirical author of The Devil's Dictionary had a keen ear for the vernacular--and that he hated it. This slim volume of his 300 or so reviled words and expressions contains many we use today with no hesitation at all. (Of "electrocution" he says, "To one having even an elementary knowledge of Latin grammar this word is no less than disgusting, and the thing meant by it is felt to be altogether too good for the word's inventor.") Jan Freeman, author of the weekly column "The Word" for the Boston Globe, annotates Bierce's rulings with style, humor, and in-depth research, revealing what Bierce got right--and what he didn't--and giving insight into how the language has changed over the past century. Write it Right, with its incisive wit and insight into the history of American English, is the perfect gift for word curmudgeons everywhere.

236 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 13, 2009

About the author

Jan Freeman is a poet and the founder and former director of Paris Press (1995–2018), which is now an imprint of Wesleyan University Press. She is the recipient of a 2020–2022 Associateship at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a complicated book.  That is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is not necessarily a good thing as well.  Once upon a time I came across a movie that was called Adaptation, and I watched it in theaters with a friend of mine.  The movie happened to be about the adapting of a book into the screen and it proved to be something both more and less than what it was adapting, and the same is the case here.  At the base level of text here is a book that Ambrose Bierce wrote in 1909 to encourage other writers, presumably other journalists, to write in a proper fashion that avoids slangy or commercial language.  Admittedly, though, the author is a bit of a crank, and when one compares his guide to his own writing, one can see that Bierce is not particularly consistent and that he sometimes flagrantly violates his own supposed prescriptivist principles, making him about as consistent as the rest of us, I suppose.  On top of this there is an extensive degree of commentary from Jan Freeman, who seems to take a much more laid-back attitude to matter of grammar and usage.

The book as a whole is a bit more than 200 pages, and it consists both of Bierce's prescriptions, which are in alphabetical order, and Freeman's commentary on each of those entries.  For the most part, Bierce's comments show him to be a bit of a crank, and hostile to the way that terms became heavily imbued with slang and commercialism over the course of the 19th century.  In general, it appears as if he, like many other American writers, felt a bit of an insecurity complex as Americans speaking English speaking differently than folks in the olde country.  Freeman appears to harbor no such insecurity and takes a look at a wide variety of similar guides as well as the history of word origins and usage and contemporary usage patterns in the United States and Great Britain as a way of gently mocking Bierce for his curmudgeonly tendencies.  The mocking is gentle, though, because Bierce was part of a much larger group of critics of the use of the English language and in at least some cases the usage patterns ended up fixing some of the issues that Bierce complained about in his own writings.

And that is really what one gets out of a book like this, a sense of context about the ways in which people have used language and complained about how others use language.  The rise of mass literacy and the continuing question of the prestige of regional and national dialects make for interesting reading even now, for a certain sort of person, and as a well-traveled writer who prided himself on his writing skill and who wanted to tweak younger rivals like Jack London, there is a lot of fascinating discussion here.  What makes a particular word or use of a word problematic?  Does its use in sports matter?  Are there journalistic standards of the use of English that need to be kept up?  Is it wrong to use terms that are regional in nature or Americanisms?  For me, it is not so important what the answers people have as the willingness to engage in the questions, and even where I disagree frequently with the way an author goes about trying to defend the legitimacy of a certain sort of English language from others, it is still entertaining to read an effort like this that comes so truly out of a man's bile.

[Hafsa El Kamous · Rating 4 out of 5]

A clear concise book that achieves what it promisses. It is also comic in its pretentiousness. I feel if it wasn't neant to be comic, it might be offensive.

I enjoyed reading it and it encouraged me to do further reading in the subject.

I recommend it.

[Sanjeev · Rating 2 out of 5]

For the first time this book made think if language should be a part of social sciences. I think it should be. Pain of author in incorrect usage words of that era have been accepted and become standard now. Poor old fellow, lucky he passes away before the SMS English is invented. Judging by his tone in through out the book, If he were alive now, I am sure he would roam around with a knife to stab people who type "cum" for " come " and 'k' for "okey"