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August 5, 2020 - March 3, 2021
The other lesson being, I suppose, that Rick Russo is terribly observant of the things one posts on one’s office door even if he doesn’t mention it at the time.
If one of your characters is speaking and drifts off dreamily in midsentence, indicate that not with a dash but with an ellipsis.
Conversely, real-life nonnative speakers of English, I find, rarely lapse into their native tongue simply to say yes, no, or thank you.
And I implore you: Do not attempt, here in the twenty-first century, to convey the utterance of a character who may be speaking other than what, for the sake of convenience, I’ll call standard English with the use of tortured phonetic spellings, the relentless replacement of terminal g’s with apostrophes, or any of the other tricks that might have worked for Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, or William Faulkner but are, I assure you, not going to work for you. At best you’ll come off as classist and condescending; at worst, in some cases, you’ll tip over into racism.
It’s been said, and sometimes I believe it, that the worst things to happen to modern fiction are the invention of the cellphone and the availability of antidepressants. But that’s a subject for another book.
Words with double c’s are troublemakers; words with double c’s and double m’s are invitations to catastrophe.
AD NAUSEAM Not spelled “ad nauseum.”
ASSASSIN, ASSASSINATE, ASSASSINATED, ASSASSINATION Don’t stint on the s’s.
BATTALION Two t’s, one l, not the other way around. Think “battle,” if that helps you.*5
BOOKKEEPER The only legitimate English word I’m aware of that includes three consecutive sets of double letters,*6 and in writing it you’re quite apt to forget the second k.*7
CAPPUCCINO Two p’s and two c’s.
DILEMMA Ask a roomful of people whether at any time in their lives they believed this word to be spelled “dilemna,” and you will receive in return quite a number of boisterous yeses. But the word is not spelled thus; it’s never been spelled thus. Whence, then, “dilemna”? It remains a mystery.
DUMBBELL Double b. The odds are good that left to your own devices you’re going to spell this “dumbell,” as you’re also likely to attempt “filmaker,” “newstand,” and “roomate.” Well, don’t.
ECSTASY Not “ecstacy.” Perhaps you’re confusing it with bureaucracy.
FORTY Rarely to never misspelled on its own, but there’s something about a follow-up “four” that leads, occasionally, to “fourty-four.”
GRAFFITI Two f’s rather than, as I occasionally run across it, two t’s. It’s a plural, by the way. There is a singular, “graffito,” but no one ever seems to use it. Perhaps because one rarely encounters a single graffito?
INDISPENSABLE Microsoft Word’s spellcheck believes “indispensible” to be correct; no one else I know does, and it rarely makes it to print.
MISSPELL, MISSPELLED, MISSPELLING To misspell “misspell” is, to borrow a phrase from the playwright Tennessee Williams,*13 slapstick tragedy.
SACRILEGIOUS One wants to spell it “sacreligious.” One can’t.
There are any number of perfectly common words in the English language featuring the ei combination with no c (or a sound) in sight, from “foreign” to “heist” to “seizure” to “weird.” To say nothing of “albeit” and “deify.”
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.
Oh, and this is crucial: The important thing to remember about peeves and crotchets is that your own peeves and crotchets reflect sensible preferences based on a refined appreciation of the music and meaning of the English language, and that everyone else’s are the products of diseased minds.
Use plain “comprise” to mean “made up of” and you’re on safe ground. But as soon as you’re about to attach the word “of” to the word “comprise,” raise your hands to the sky and edit yourself.
DISINTERESTED I’d be happier if you’d restrict your use of “disinterested” to suggest impartiality and, when speaking of lack of interest, make use of the handy “uninterested.” I don’t think that’s asking a lot.
I’ll meet you in the middle. Feel free to use “enormity” to describe something that is not only big but monstrously, freakishly so or to describe something arduous (“the enormity of my workload”). Avoid it in positive uses (“the enormity of her talent”) because it’s a needless eyebrow raiser.
FEWER THAN/LESS THAN Perhaps you’ve turned this distinction into a fetish. The strict—and, really, not all that hard to remember—differentiation is that “fewer than” is applied to countable objects (fewer bottles of beer on the wall) and “less than” to what we call exclusively singular nouns (less happiness, less quality) and mass nouns (fewer chips, less guacamole).
FORTUITOUS As to the use of “fortuitous” to mean fortunate or favorable, it’s universally acceptable so long as the good fortune or favor is accidental, because that’s what “fortuitous” means: by chance (though, in its original sense, with no guarantee of a happy ending). If you achieve something good by the sweat of your brow, find a word that better honors your achievement.
IMPACT (AS A VERB) The use of the verb “impact,” in the sense of “affect,” when “affect” might be deemed perfectly appropriate and sufficient, is a true scream inducer. Perhaps you’re already screaming.
Funniness is not irony. Coincidence is not irony. Weirdness is not irony. Rain on your wedding day is not irony. Irony is irony.
LITERALLY A respectable word that has been distorted into the Intensifier from Hell. No, you did not literally die laughing. No, I don’t care that all your cool friends use “literally” thus. If all your cool friends literally jumped off the Empire State Building, would you?*10
Eventually I learned the traditional differentiation between “nauseous”—causing nausea—and “nauseated”—preparing to heave—but it was too late for me to mend my ways, so I’m still happy, as it were, to be nauseous.
ON ACCIDENT Yes, it’s “on purpose.” No, it’s not “on accident.” It’s “by accident.”
PASS AWAY In conversation with a bereaved relative, one might, I suppose, refer to someone having passed away or passed. In writing, people die.
PENULTIMATE “Penultimate” is not a fancyism for “ultimate.” It does not mean “like totally ultimate, bro.” It means “the thing before the last thing.”
PERUSE I’ve given up on “peruse,” because a word that’s used to mean both “read thoroughly and carefully” and “glance at cursorily” is...
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RESIDE You mean “live”?
VERY UNIQUE In the 1906 edition of The King’s English, H. W. Fowler declared—and he was neither the first nor the last person to so declare—“A thing is unique, or not unique; there are no degrees of uniqueness; nothing is ever somewhat or rather unique, though many things are almost or in some respects unique.” I will allow that something can be virtually unique but can’t be more than—not very, not especially, not really—unique. You might as well hang a KICK ME sign on your writing.*12
“Hoity-toity” and “fancy-shmancy” are examples of what’s called reduplication, if that’s a thing you’d like to know. See also, among many others, “easy-peasy,” “knickknack,” and “boogie-woogie.”
A word that means its own opposite is a contronym, though the term “Janus word”—you remember two-faced Janus, looking ahead and behind at the same time, yes?—is also applied, and it packs a thrill. “Sanction” (to allow and to penalize) and “cleave” (to hold fast and to cut up) are classic Janus words.
My editor wants me to tell you here never to use the words “yummy,” “panties,” or “guac.” Mission accomplished.
AFFECT/EFFECT The traditional snap differentiation between “affect” and “effect” is that “affect” is a verb (“This martini is so watery, it doesn’t affect me at all”) and “effect” is a noun (“This martini is so watery, it has no effect on me at all”). Which is true as far as it goes. But only that far.
AMBIGUOUS/AMBIVALENT To be ambiguous is to lack clarity, to be murkily open to misinterpretation. To be ambivalent is to have mixed feelings. One’s meaning may be ambiguous, but one’s attitude is ambivalent.
“Amuck” is simply a variant spelling of “amok,” and for quite some time it was the more popular English-language spelling. “Amok” overtook it in the 1940s, and I’d like to think that the 1953 Merrie Melodies classic Duck Amuck, featuring the eponymous Daffy, finished off “amuck” in any other but comical contexts.
“Anymore” = any longer or at this time, as in “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” “Any more” = an additional amount, as in “I don’t want any more pie, thank you.”
BAWL/BALL To bawl one’s eyes out is to weep profusely. To ball one’s eyes out would be some sort of sporting or teabagging mishap.
If you insist on using “blonde” as an adjective, I must insist that you apply it only to women, as the concluding e, via the French, marks the word as feminine.
BORN/BORNE The word you want for discussions of birth, actual or metaphorical, is “born,” whether one was born yesterday, born in a trunk or out of wedlock, or New York–born. Otherwise, things that are carried or produced are borne. Diseases are insect-borne. A tree that bears fruit has, then, borne fruit. The right to bear arms is the right to have borne them. And though triumph may be born out of tragedy, one’s grand schemes may not be borne out in reality.
“Breech” is an outmoded term for buttocks; thus trousers were once breeches. A breech birth is one in which the baby emerges buttocks (or feet) first.
CACHE/CACHET A cache is a place for hiding one’s valuables or a collection of things so hidden. As a verb, then, to cache means to hide. One might, I suppose, cache one’s cache of cash in an underground cache. Cachet is the quality of prestige and distinction, as Edith Wharton’s avaricious, ambitious Undine Spragg, in The Custom of the Country, marries for social cachet. And for cash. Though the pronunciation of words, as opposed to their spelling and use, is, as I’ve mentioned, outside my bailiwick, I’m happy to point out that “cache” is pronounced exactly like “cash,” whereas “cachet” has
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CARAT/KARAT/CARET/CARROT A carat is a unit of weight applied to gemstones. The proportion of gold in an alloy is measured in karats, the purest gold being 24-karat. A caret is a copyediting and proofreading symbol (it looks like this: ^) showing where new text is to be inserted into an already set line. Carrots are what Bugs Bunny eats.
