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

by Benjamin Dreyer

CONFIDANT/CONFIDANTE If you’re not a fan of gendered nouns, you can certainly apply “confidant” to anyone with whom you share confidences. Don’t, though, refer to a man as a confidante; confidantes are, solely, women.

More commonly, a queue is a line of people waiting for something. (Did you know that a line of people walking in pairs is called a crocodile?)

EMIGRATE/IMMIGRATE One emigrates from a place; one immigrates to a place. My paternal grandfather emigrated from Latvia; he immigrated to the United States. The terms are used to describe movement from one nation or continent to another; one does not, say, emigrate from Chicago to New York, or even from Chicago to Paris.

EPIGRAM/EPIGRAPH An epigram is a succinct, smart, and, as a rule, humorous statement, of the sort Oscar Wilde used to toss about like Ritz crackers to stray ducks. For instance, from the irresistibly quotable The Importance of Being Earnest: “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.” An epigraph is an evocative quotation—rarely humorous but generally succinct—set at the beginning of a book, often immediately after the dedication, or at the beginning of a chapter.

EVERYDAY/EVERY DAY “Everyday” is an adjective (“an everyday occurrence”), “every day” an adverb (“I go to work every day”). “Everyday” is increasingly often being used as an adverb; this is highly bothersome, and please don’t you dare speed up the trend.

FARTHER/FURTHER As a rule, or at least what passes for a rule, “farther” is reserved for literal physical distance (“I’m so exhausted, I can’t take a step farther”) and “further” is used figuratively, as a measure of degree or time (“Later this afternoon we can discuss this weighty matter further”). In the face of ambiguity, go with “further.” Our friends the Brits alleviate the ambiguity by mostly using “further” for everything.

FLOUNDER/FOUNDER To flounder is to struggle clumsily; to founder is to sink or to fail. Floundering may precede foundering; thus the terms are sometimes confused.

Well, for a start: If you’re hesitating between “lie” and “lay” and (a) your sentence has a thing to act upon and (b) you can replace the verb you’re in a quandary about with a less confusingly transitive verb like “place,” you need a “lay.”

Bonus Lay/Lie Facts The action of lying down does not require that one be a person, as some people mistakenly (and, I think, oddly) believe. I lie down. Fiona the hippopotamus lies down. Pat the bunny lies down. One doesn’t, in present-tense hiding, lay low or, in ambush, lay in wait. It’s “lie” all the way: I lie low; I lie in wait. That said, one does lay a trap for one’s enemy, and given the chance, one will lay that enemy low.

LOATH/LOATHE I am loath—that is, reluctant—to make comments, snide or otherwise, about people I loathe—that is, detest. Use “loath” as an adjective; use “loathe” as a verb.

PEAK/PEEK/PIQUE Mixing these up is direly easy. A peak is a summit; a peek is a glance. The ea in “sneak” inspires many an erroneous “sneak peak.” No, please: It’s “sneak peek.” (Unless you find yourself jetting through a cloud and suddenly about to collide with a mountain, in which case, sure, that’s a sneak peak.) A fit of pique is a peeved little tantrum; to pique one’s interest is to stimulate and excite it.

For the record: To be supine is to be lying on one’s back. To be prone is to be lying on one’s stomach.

RELUCTANT/RETICENT To be reluctant is to be resistant, unwilling. To be reticent is to be silent, uncommunicative. One is reluctant to do X; one is reticent about subject Y. “Reticent” is increasingly often used to mean “reluctant.” I see no good reason to allow the distinction between these two to collapse, though many have given up on it.

Pseudonyms are not alternate identities but simply alternate names used for professional, literary, political, or, occasionally, terroristic purposes: Currer Bell for Charlotte Brontë, Lewis Carroll for Charles Dodgson, Leon Trotsky for Lev Davidovich Bronstein, Carlos the Jackal for Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, etc.

ELIZABETH BENNET Headstrong heroine of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Just the one t in Bennet. It’s not “Jane Austin.” Does that bear mentioning? I fear that it does.

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON Tragically lost opportunity. A two-l Hillary. Novelist Mantel and actress Swank are one-l Hilarys.

MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY Actor. His surname is impossible to spell correctly.

SPIDER-MAN Superhero. Note the hyphen, note the capital M

ANTARCTICA Two c’s.

ARCTIC Also two c’s.

THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI The English-language title of Pierre Boulle’s novel Le pont de la rivière Kwai. (Boulle was also the author of La planète des singes, first published in English as Monkey Planet. You may know it best as Planet of the Apes.)*13 David Lean’s film thereof is The Bridge on the River Kwai.

It’s not OK to call Frankenstein’s monster “Frankenstein,” and people who willfully advocate for this make me cross.

IMMACULATE CONCEPTION The issue here is not of spelling but of definition. The Immaculate Conception is the doctrine that Mary, the future mother of Jesus, was conceived in her mother’s womb (by the standard biological means) without the taint of original sin. The belief in the virgin birth*18 of Jesus is the belief that Jesus was conceived through the Holy Spirit, without a human father, and while his mother was, indeed, still a virgin. The former is not the latter. In the words of Christopher Durang’s homicidal nun Sister Mary Ignatius: “Everyone makes this error; it makes me lose my patience.”

REVELATION The New Testament’s Book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse. Not “Revelations.”

WOOKIEE Everyone gets it wrong. It’s not “Wookie.” Also on the subject of the world of Star Wars, “lightsaber” is one word, “dark side” is lowercased (oddly enough), and “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….” ends with a period and three ellipsis points, even though it is a fragment and not a complete sentence, because that is how the Star Wars people like it. And if you challenge them on any of these points, they’ll cut your hand off. True story.

CAP’N CRUNCH Not “Captain.”

CRACKER JACK Many (most?) people call this classic combination of candied popcorn and peanuts “Cracker Jacks,” but to do so wrecks the rhyme “Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack / I don’t care if I never get back.” It’s also not the name of the product.

FROOT LOOPS An intentionally comic misspelling (as “Froot”) is called a cacography.

MEN’S WEARHOUSE Not “Warehouse.” It’s a joke. Get it?

THERE’S A LOT OF DELETING IN COPYEDITING, not just of the “very”s and “rather”s and “quite”s and excrescent “that”s with which we all encase our prose like so much Bubble Wrap and packing peanuts, but of restatements of information—“AS ESTAB’D,” one politely jots in the margin.

for those moments when you’re contemplating that either you or your prose could stand to go on a diet and your prose seems the easier target, here’s a good place to start.

advance planning, advance warning

ATM machine

cameo appearance, cameo role

end result I can appreciate the difference between a midprogress result and an ultimate result, but “end result” is cloddish.

final outcome

follow after

fuse together

future plans

lesbian woman Come on, folks. Think.

might possibly

overexaggerate Even spellcheck sneers at it.

past history

rise up If you think I’m going to pick a fight with Lin-Manuel Miranda, who uses the phrase “rise up” repeatedly in Hamilton’s “My Shot,” you have another think coming.

sudden impulse

surrounded on all sides

wall mural No, really, I’ve seen this.

Here’s a fun weird thing: The word “namesake” works in both directions. That is, if you were named after your grandfather, you are his namesake. He is also yours. Who knew.

There’s a world of difference between going into the water (an action generally accompanied by flailing and shrieking and other merriment) and going in the water (an action generally accompanied by staring abstractedly into the distance, and, no, you’re not fooling anyone), and it’s a difference to be honored. Into = movement. In = presence.

Of two brothers, one fifteen and one seventeen, the fifteen-year-old is the younger, not the youngest, and the seventeen-year-old is the older (or elder, if you like), not the oldest (or eldest). It takes three to make an “-est.” Except, English being English, in the phrase “best foot forward.”