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

by Benjamin Dreyer

Pause for effect. “Copy editors,” she intoned, and I can still hear every crisp consonant and orotund vowel, all these years later, “are like priests, safeguarding their faith.” Now, that’s a benediction.

Which brings me, somewhat circuitously, to you, dear reader—I’ve always wanted to say that, “dear reader,” and now, having said it, I promise never to say it again—and why we’re here.

In the Star Trek example, then, an unsplit infinitive version would be “Boldly to go where no man has gone before” or “To go boldly where no man has gone before.” If either of those sounds better to you, be my guest. To me they sound as if they were translated from the Vulcan.

Often, in a sentence constructed in the passive voice, the actor is omitted entirely. Sometimes this is done in an attempt to call attention to a problem without laying blame (“The refrigerator door was left open”) and sometimes, in weasel-like fashion, to avoid taking responsibility: “Mistakes were made,” for instance, which, uttered on various occasions by various Bushes, may well be the motto of that political dynasty.

Feel free to end a sentence shaped like a question that isn’t really a question with a period rather than a question mark. It makes a statement, doesn’t it.

Whatever you want to call it: Use it. I don’t want to belabor the point; neither am I willing to negotiate it. Only godless savages eschew the series comma. No sentence has ever been harmed by a series comma, and many a sentence has been improved by one.

Best Illustration of the Necessity of the “Only” Comma I’ve Ever Managed to Rustle Up Elizabeth Taylor’s second marriage, to Michael Wilding Elizabeth Taylor’s second marriage to Richard Burton

Step back, I’m about to hit the CAPS LOCK key.

As, for instance and strictly speaking, you might do here, in quoting this piece of text I 100 percent made up out of thin air and didn’t find on, say, Twitter: Their [sic] was no Collusion [sic] and there was no Obstruction [sic].

In the bakery, above the rye bread, was a sign that read: TRY OUR RUGELACH! IT’S THE “BEST!” I was fascinated. This, as they say in the comic books, is my origin story.

According to copyediting tradition—at least copyediting tradition as it was handed down to me—one uses no more than two em dashes in a single sentence, and I think that’s good advice—except when it’s not.

And the likes of “What a lovely day!” with a period rather than a bang, as some people like to call the exclamation point, might seem sarcastic. Or depressed.

We won’t discuss the use of ?! or !? because you’d never do that.*50 65. Neither will we discuss the interrobang, because we’re all civilized adults here.

Highlights of his global tour include encounters with a dildo collector, an 800-year-old demigod, and Nelson Mandela.” Was that so hard? And seriously: What sort of global tour was that?

On a Mac, you can create an en dash by typing option-hyphen. On an iPhone, if you lean gently on the hyphen key, an en dash will present itself, as well as an em dash and a bullet. On a PC, I believe one types command–3–do the hokey pokey, or some such.

to remind you but will anyway) before it.

Not that it comes up all that often, but an American can get away with “sepulchre,” which truly looks more sepulchral than “sepulcher,” and the dictionary will back you up on that.

Buy me a cocktail or two and I’ll regale you at length with my admittedly crackpot notion that gray and grey are, push comes to shove, two different colors, the former having a glossy, almost silvery sheen to it, the latter being heavier, duller, and sodden.

Or as I once said to T. S. Eliot, “Tom, it’s not ‘Not with a bang but a whimper.’ It’s ‘With not a bang but a whimper’ or ‘Not with a bang but with a whimper.’ Let’s get it right.”

Also remember that if you’re rummaging through old newspaper archives to see what was going on on September 24, 1865, you’d do well to look at newspapers dated September 25, 1865.)

PLS. CONFIRM THE EXISTENCE OF BURGER KINGS IN THE 1960S.” The author ultimately chose to change the Burger King to some sort of Grilled Sandwich Shack of his own devise, acknowledging to me that though he’d carefully researched the history of the food chain and was accurate in his citation, every single person who’d read the manuscript before I did had asked him the same question, and it wasn’t, he decided, worth the reader hiccup.

How often do you stare into the middle distance? Me neither.

My nightmare sentence is “And then suddenly he began to cry.”

If your seething, exasperated characters must hiss something—and, really, must they?—make sure they’re hissing something hissable. “Take your hand off me, you brute!” she hissed. —CHARLES GARVICE, Better Than Life (1891) Um, no, she didn’t. You try it. “Chestnuts, chestnuts,” he hissed. “Teeth! teeth! my preciousss; but we has only six!” —J.R.R. TOLKIEN, The Hobbit (1937) OK, now we’re cooking.

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?

PARAPHERNALIA That r just past the midpoint has a tendency to fall out.

I've been spelling this wrong my entire life, and just found out right now

SUPERSEDE Not “supercede.” I have never in my life spelled “supersede” correctly on the first go.

TENDINITIS Not “tendonitis,” though that’s likely an unstoppable respelling of the word (and I note that the local spellcheck has refused to call it out with the Red Dots of Shame).

It’s considered bad copyeditorial form to verbify trademarks, but if you must (and, yes, I know you think you must), I suggest that you lowercase them in so doing. Sorry/not sorry, Xerox Corporation.

My problem with mnemonic devices is that I can’t remember them.

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.

The generally preferred American spelling is “ax,” but I’d much rather be an axe-murderess than an ax-murderess. You?)

Begging the question, as the term is traditionally understood, is a kind of logical fallacy—the original Latin is petitio principii, and no, I don’t know these things off the top of my head; I look them up like any normal human being—in which one argues for the legitimacy of a conclusion by citing as evidence the very thing one is trying to prove in the first place.

As to people who object to supermarket express-lane signs reading “10 ITEMS OR LESS”? On the one hand, I hear you. On the other hand, get a hobby. Maybe flower arranging, or decoupage.

Funniness is not irony. Coincidence is not irony. Weirdness is not irony. Rain on your wedding day is not irony. Irony is irony. I once copyedited a work in which the author, if he used the phrase “deliciously ironic” once, used it a dozen times. The problem was, nothing he ever said was either delicious or ironic. Which, as a colleague pointed out, was deliciously ironic.

The use of “onboard” as a verb in place of “familiarize” or “integrate” is grotesque. It’s bad enough when it’s applied to policies; applied to new employees in place of the perfectly lovely word “orient,” it’s worse. And it feels like a terribly short walk from onboarding a new employee to waterboarding one.

I’ve given up on “peruse,” because a word that’s used to mean both “read thoroughly and carefully” and “glance at cursorily” is as close to useless as a word can be.

TRY AND If you try and do something, someone will immediately tell you to try to do it, so you might as well just try to do it so no one will yell at you.

oh god i say this all the time

“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.”

hurdygurdy!

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.

oh my god?

(Most people discern correctly between “fiancé” and “fiancée,” but most is not all.)

HOME/HONE Birds of prey and missiles home in on their targets. To hone is to sharpen. The phrase “hone in on” is one of those so-many-people-use-it-that-it-has-its-own-dictionary-entry-and-can-scarcely-anymore-be-called-an-error things, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

To loose something is to set it free. Oddly, to unloose something is also to set it free.

Something lush or plentiful is luxuriant: Rapunzel’s hair, say, or kudzu.

A mantel is a shelf above a fireplace. A mantle is a sleeveless, capelike garment. Metaphorically, it’s the thing you don when you’re assuming some responsibility.

“Past” is both noun and adjective, as in William Faulkner’s “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” It’s also a preposition, and an adverb, and just about anything else you can think of except a verb.

One’s principal is, as well, one’s amassed bank holdings that one aspires not to touch so that one can live entirely on one’s interest. Good luck with that.

For names featuring three initials, go with the more compact J.R.R. Tolkien for instance, because on the page, J. R. R. Tolkien, not unlike the Peter Jackson films taken from his books, goes on for bloody ever.

KEANU REEVES Star of Bill & Ted comedies, Matrix uncomedies, and John Wick unintentional comedies.

HARRY S. TRUMAN President on whose desk the buck stopped. The middle initial doesn’t stand for anything, so for decades copy editors have amused themselves, if no one else, by styling his name as Harry S Truman. Truman seems to have (mostly) signed his name with a perioded S, so let’s do it that way.