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

by Benjamin Dreyer

“Continual” means ongoing but with pause or interruption,

“Continuous” means ceaseless,

Perhaps people think it’s fancier.

One’s crotchets are one’s unreasonable notions or one’s eccentric habits.

A cue is a signal,

“You sockdologizing old man-trap,” a line in Tom Taylor’s 1858 comedy Our American Cousin, may be the most notorious cue in history, as the audience laughter it inspired was expected by John Wilkes Booth—an actor, but not in this particular play—to smother the sound of his gunshot as he assassinated Abraham Lincoln.

(Did you know that a line of people walking in pairs is called a crocodile?)

To queue, then, is to get in line.

I’m not certain when the term arrived in the United States, but it certainly seems to have its green card by now.

“Demur” and “demurral” also carry a less frequently used meaning: delay.

To be demure is to be modest or reserved.

Use the former as a noun, for progeny and progeny’s progeny; use the latter as an adjective to describe said progenies, or to describe something moving downward.

Many go wrong in their attempt to haul out the venerable*15 phrase referring to people receiving their comeuppance. Such people are getting not their “just desserts” but their just deserts—they are getting precisely what they deserve.

If you’re aware of the psychological meaning of dissociation—a separation from reality that occurs in crisis—you may come to think of “disassociation” as better suited to more everyday severances, as, say, disassociating oneself from an offensive statement made by one’s racist uncle at Thanksgiving dinner.

discrete—separate and distinct—things.

I suppose one could, feigning fright, eke out an eek.

One emigrates from a place; one immigrates to a place.

The terms are used to describe movement from one nation or continent to another;

“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.”

“Everyday” is an adjective (“an everyday occurrence”), “every day” an adverb (“I go to work every day”).

To put it as simply as I can, if you confine evoking to the figurative and invoking to the actual, you’ll do fine.

“further” is used figuratively,

To fawn is to be obsequious in a quest for favor, to apple-polish, to bootlick, to suck up.

One ferments (alcoholizes) beer or wine; one foments (stirs up) discord.

The use of the verb “ferment” as a synonym for the verb “foment” agitates many people; it cannot, however, be said to be incorrect.

If you’re being roundly criticized, you’re catching not flack but flak.

To flout is to show contempt for or to defy; the word seems to be more or less permanently attached to either “the law” or “the rules.”

To flesh out is to add substance,

To flush out is to clean something by forcing water through it,

I suggest reserving “flier” for the soaring-in-the-air thing and “flyer” for the sheet of paper heading imminently into the recycle bin.

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.

One’s forebears are one’s ancestors.*17

Forward is a direction: not backward.

When Jell-O sets, or when one’s master plan takes shape, it either gels or jells. I like “jells.”

The periodically encountered use of “jive” to mean “jibe” (“I’m so pleased that our plans for the weekend jive”) is unsupportable, etymologically or any other -ly.

“Grizzled” refers to hair streaked with gray—and, by extension, it makes a decent synonym for “old.” It does not mean, as many people seem to think it does, either unkempt or rugged.

HANGED/HUNG Criminals are hanged. Paintings are hung. Some. Also men. Some.

to hawk (outside discussion of birds, that is) is to sell and to hock is to pawn.

“Historical” simply denotes presence in the past.

To hoard is to amass, often with an eye toward secrecy;

“Horde” is most often used as an uncomplimentary term for a teeming crowd of something or other: Mongol invaders, say, or sidewalk-blocking tourists in Times Square, or zombies.

Think of “imply” as an outward action and “infer” as an inward one. Or: Speakers imply; listeners infer.

Interment is ritual burial,

(To put something into an urn—particularly ashes after a cremation, which I hope you don’t call cremains—is to inurn it.)

No matter the perspicacity of any statement you may ever present publicly in print or, especially, online, an inability to discern between “its” and “it’s” (and, see below, “your” and “you’re”) will make you a target for thunderous belittling. It’s not fair, I suppose, but neither is life generally, I find.

To kibitz is to chitchat.

A kibbutz, with two b’s, is an Israeli socialistic farming collective.

One notes that “lay” is a transitive verb, which means that it demands an object. A transitive verb doesn’t merely do; it must do to something. One does not merely lay; one lays a thing.*21

“Lie,” on the other hand, is an intransitive verb. I lie, period. Works for both recumbence and fibbing. No object needed. “Lie” can handle an adverb (I lie down, I lie badly) or a place on which to do it (I lie on the couch); it just doesn’t need a thing, a what, attached to it.

That the past participle of “lie” is “lain,” which never looks right to anyone, is bad enough. That the past tense of “lie” is “lay,” the very word we are trying so hard not to misuse in the first place, is maddening. I know. I’m sorry.