Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

by Benjamin Dreyer

HERE’S YOUR FIRST CHALLENGE: Go a week without writing very rather really quite in fact And you can toss in—or, that is, toss out—“just” (not in the sense of “righteous” but in the sense of “merely”) and “so” (in the “extremely” sense, though as conjunctions go it’s pretty disposable too). Oh yes: “pretty.” As in “pretty tedious.” Or “pretty pedantic.” Go ahead and kill that particular darling. And “of course.” That’s right out. And “surely.” And “that said.” And “actually”? Feel free to go the rest of your life without another “actually.”*1 If you can last a week without writing any of what I’ve come to think of as the Wan Intensifiers and Throat Clearers—I wouldn’t ask you to go a week without saying them; that would render most people, especially British people, mute—you will at the end of that week be a considerably better writer than you were at the beginning.

According to the lovely folks at Merriam-Webster, the term “hippie,” in the sense of hirsute member of the counterculture, dates back to 1965, which is a skosh later than I might have guessed. One fun thing about dictionaries is that they’ll provide a date of introduction into written English for just about any word you can think of. This comes in awfully handy when you’re writing period fiction and wish to be era-appropriate, especially in dialogue. Copyediting a novel set during New York’s 1863 Draft Riots, I learned that what we now call a hangover—a term that didn’t pop up till 1894—was known in those earlier days as, among other things, a “katzenjammer.” Note, please, my use of quotation marks just now. I needed them.

Footnote pop quiz: Why, then, would I hyphenate the likes of “scholarly-looking teenagers” or “lovely-smelling flowers”? Because not all “-ly” words are adverbs. Sometimes they’re adjectives. Really, I’m sorry.

The Brits think that the word “gotten” is moronic, and they’re not shy about telling you so.

Correct on that one

The Brits often set periods or commas outside closing quote marks. U.K.: When it comes to Beatles songs, Queen Elizabeth is particularly fond of ‘Eleanor Rigby’, but her absolute favourite is ‘Drive My Car’. U.S.: When it comes to Beatles songs, Queen Elizabeth is particularly fond of “Eleanor Rigby,” but her absolute favorite is “Drive My Car.” If there’s anything that Brits despise about American punctuation, it’s this. “The song title does not contain a comma or a period,” they’ll growl. “Why are you sticking it inside the quotation marks?” For some reason, “It’s the American way” does not satisfy them. But it is the American way, and though I do see the logic of the Brit methodology, I’m certainly not going to be the person who attempts to upend universal stateside practice. Moreover, I find the sight of those periods and commas hanging outside quotation marks saddening. To me they look lonely and unloved.

When I first drafted this section, I relegated the discussion of the use of pronouns for nonbinary people—people who do not identify as male or female—to a terse footnote acknowledging the relatively recent invention of alternate pronouns (I guess I’ve encountered the “ze”/“zir” system most frequently, but there are a number of others, which certainly impedes universal adoption) and the increasing use of what one might call a particularly singular “they,” blithely declared the matter cultural rather than copyeditorial, and excused myself from discussing it further. In other words, I cut and ran like hell.

There’s nothing to be gained by referring to the playwright Tennessee Williams as “the famous playwright Tennessee Williams.” If a person is famous enough to be referred to as famous, there’s no need to refer to that person as famous, is there. Neither is there much to be gained by referring to “the late Tennessee Williams,” much less “the late, great Tennessee Williams,” which is some major cheese. I’m occasionally asked how long a dead person is appropriately late rather than just plain dead. I don’t know, and apparently neither does anyone else.

BASED OFF OF No. Just no. “An intentional tremor, with prepositions,” as a friend described it. The inarguably—so don’t argue with me—correct phrase is “based on.”

I suppose I might just say “If it starts with a capital letter, look it up” and end this chapter right here, but where would be the fun in that?

REALTOR A registered trademark of the National Association of Realtors. Not every real estate agent is a Realtor, and I see no reason to write “realtor” when you can just as easily write “real estate agent.”

slightly ajar

“The very existence of self-help books is all the evidence you need that they don’t work,” a former colleague of mine once quipped—perhaps more cleverly than truthfully, but the quip business is built more on rat-a-tat effectiveness than on strict accuracy.