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

by Benjamin Dreyer

Einstein is only one of the pin-the-wisdom-on-the-maven targets. Five’ll get you ten that a quote you find attributed, particularly without reference to a published source, to Abraham Lincoln is inauthentic; the same goes for Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde (and with the thousands of witticisms Wilde uttered, why would anyone put words into his mouth?), Winston Churchill, or Dorothy Parker (like Wilde, an industrial-strength generator of cleverness).

There are any number of ways to verify or debunk quotes: Wikiquote, with individual entries for just about everyone who ever picked up a pen, not only lists a writer’s greatest hits but helpfully links you to the published sources of said hits and, perhaps even more helpfully, includes reliable sections on disputed and misattributed quotes. If you want to explore on your own, make use of the highly searchable books.google.com. If you can’t, with a modicum of effort, find a published source for a quote, the odds are at least reasonable that it’s a sham. I also commend to you the work of the doggedly thorough Garson O’Toole, who runs the Quote Investigator website (access it via quoteinvestigator.com, to be sure) and tweets as @QuoteResearch, and who specializes in not only debunking fake or misattributed quotes but time-traveling backward through the archives to discern, if he can, how and when the fakeries and misattributions first occurred.

Build yourself, on either a virtual or a paper tablet, what’s known as a commonplace book—someplace you can copy down bits of writing you encounter and find clever and/or meaningful—and keep it handy for future use, even if that future use is simply your own edification. (Don’t forget to make note of where you found the stuff.) Then at least, should you find yourself in a position to share with the world your own wisdom and want to periodically sprinkle it with others’ smarts, you’ll at least have something fresh and heartfelt to offer.

Title case is the convention of capitalizing, in titles of works (books, book chapters, plays, movies—you get the idea) and, often though not always, in newspaper and magazine headlines, the first letter of all the important words. Which are the important words of a title? the first word and the last word all nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs Which are the words that don’t make the capital cut? articles (“a,” “an,” “the”) conjunctions (“and,” “but,” “if,” “or,” etc.) Then clarity goes to heck. What about prepositions? If you say “prepositions are invariably to be lowercased,” as some indeed say, you’re going to be up against titles like Seven against Thebes or I Served alongside Rommel, and that certainly won’t do. The cleverer people endorse lowercasing the shorter prepositions, of which there are many, including “at,” “by,” “but,” “from,” “into,” “of,” “to,” and “with,” and capping the longer ones, like “despite,” “during,” and “toward.” I’ll admit that the four-letter prepositions can cause puzzlement—I’d certainly never cap “with,” but a lowercase “over” can look a little underrespected.

Particularly don’t forget that some terribly important words are terribly short. Make sure you’ve capped that “It” (to say nothing of that “He,” that “She,” that “His,” and that “Hers”), and especially make sure you’ve capped those big leaguers “Is” and “Be,” the lowercasing*5 of which is as close to a title-case capital crime as I can think of.

In conclusion: There’s many a day I’m sympathetic to the title-case policy of capping every damn word and the hell with it, but then I see a headline like The Fault Is Not In Our Stars But In Our Stars’ Salaries and I cringe and change my mind.

Something that is well established down to the marrow is not “deep-seeded,” which may sound as if it makes sense but, I’m assured by people who know how plants work, doesn’t. It is, rather, “deep-seated.”

There’s no rule without an exception (well, mostly), there’s no thought without an afterthought (at least for me), there’s always something you meant to say but forgot to say. There’s no last word, only the next word.